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THE
St.
Spring, 1984
�Editor:
J.
Walter Sterling
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parr an, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Susan Lord
Editorial Board:
Eva Brann
S. Richard Freis,
Alumni representative
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
Curtis A. Wilson
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems
are welcome, but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned
comments are also welcome.
The St. John's Review (formerly The Col·
lege) is published by the Office of the
Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre,
President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the winter,
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$36.00 for three years, payable in ad·
vance. Address all correspondence to
The St. John's Review, St. John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXV, Number 2
Spring, 1984
©
1984 St. John's College; All rights
reserved. Reproduction in whole or in
part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4 720
Composition: Fishergate Publishing Co., Inc.
Printing: The john D. Lucas Printing Co.
Errata:
In Beate Ruhm von Oppen, "Stu·
dent Rebellion and the Nazis: 'The
White Rose' in its Setting;' The St.
John's Review. Winter 1984:
page 4, column 1, paragraph 3, line
12, should read: of a dollar a year
later:
page 4, column 2, last paragraph,
line 1 should read: Life at school
changed greatly ...
page 7, column 2, paragraph 3, last
line should read: officially, in
international discourse.
paragraph 4, line 5 should read: he
ended a long speech with a long
sentence affirming
�THE
StJohn's Review
Contents
2 . . . . . . The Inefficacy of the Good
Douglas Allanbrook
14 . . . . . . Via Positiva; Via Negativa (poems)
Gretchen Berg
16 . . . . . . Logos and the Underground
Curtis Wilson
26 . . . . . . Orwell's Future and the Past
Ronald Berman
34 . . . . . . Is Nature a Republic?
David :)tephenson
40 ...... Between Plato and Descartes-The Mediaeval Transformation in the
Ontological Status of the Ideas
James Mensch
48 . . . . . . Looking Together in Athens
Mera Flaumenhajt
60 . . . . . . Two Manuscripts of Jacob Klein's from the 30's
Left and Right
The Frame of the Timaeus
OccASIONAL DrscouRSES
66 . . . . . . The Roots of Modemity
Eva Brann
BooK REviEw
70 . . . . . . U.S. Catholic Bishops, Nuclear weapons and U.S. defense policy
Robert L. :)paeth
73 . . . . . . Cumulative Index, April 1969-Winter, 1984
ON THE COVER: Athens, Acropolis, The Parthenon. Gallery of The South Peristyle.
�ST. JOHN's REVIEW
Spring 1984
The Inefficacy of the Good
Douglas Allanbrook
T
he field upon which political actions are
played is one of moral desolation. If certain
men or cities stand high and brilliant above
this field, are remembered and praised in
future generations by their countrymen or
by the world, this praise, these many political encomia,
almost never arise out of the goodness or true virtue of
the subject; they are service rendered by words and
memory to power, fame, and empire. Caesar's name lives
on in the very titles of power and empire- the Kaiser,
the Czar of all the Russias-while Catds suicide is
cherished in the memory of a few as a proper failure,
and he himself is most marvelously enshrined on the
lowest slope of Purgatory as Dante leaves Hell and begins
to go up. It is apposite in this consideration to rememher Thucydides' words concerning poor Nicias when his
life comes to an end at the end of the Syracusan adventure, as recounted almost at the very end of Book VII
of the histories. You will recall Nicias' actions against the
demagogue Cleon, whom Thucydides detests, and hJs
opposition to Alcibiades in front of the assembly which
was to decide upon the Sicilian expedition. He attempted
to deter the Athenians from the venture by calling to their
attention the enormity of the cost and the vastness of the
armaments required. Of course the effect of his speech
on the assembly was the opposite of what he had expected, "for it seemed to them that he had given good
advice, and that now certainly there would be abundant
security."* And soon, "upon all alike there fell an ardent
desire (eros) to sail~' (VI-XXIV, 2-3).
*The translations of Thucydides are Charles Foster Smith's published
in the Loeb Classical Library.
Douglas Allanbrook is a composer and tutor at St. John's College,
Annapolis. This article was delivered as a formal lecture in Annapolis
in the fall of 1983.
2
The Spartans in the Pylos affair knew that N icias was
for peace, and indeed the period of relative calm in the
midst of the long war was known as the Peace of Nicias.
He was a very rich and pious man, and it is a terrible
irony that this very piety fatally delayed a possible retreat
for the Athenians in the last awful month in front of
Syracuse. He knew that the Spartans trusted him,
and it was not least on that account that he trusted in
Gylippus (the Spartan general) and surrendered himself
to him. But it was said that some of the Syracusans were
afraid, seeing that they had been in communication with
him, lest, if he were subjected to torture on that account,
he might make trouble for them in the midst of their
success; and others, especially the Corinthians, were
afraid, lest, as he was wealthy, he might by means of
bribes make his escape and cause them fresh difficulties;
they therefore persuaded their allies and put him to
death. For this reason, then, or for a reason very near
to this, Nicias was put to death-a man who, of all the
Hellenes of my time, least deserved to meet with such
a calamity, because of his course of life that had been
wholly regulated in accordance with virtue.
(VII-LXXXVI, 4-5) ..
Many years ago from this platform I lectured on the
Spanish Civil War, and I employed a lengthy simile in
an attempt to catch the nature of what was revealed in
that and perhaps in all civil wars. It struck me in my
younger years that the Spanish War crystallized the conscience of the age, and revealed the more enormous civil
war that is the perennial fact of our political life. My
simile was drawn from Geology. Our landscapes, from
sea to shining sea, with their fields of grain and their
snowy Rockies, have their origins in vulcanism, in eruptions, in lava flows, in revolutions and the grinding of
tectonic plates. The intent of the simile was to focus the
attention of students upon the gleaming surface of our
SPRING 1984
�republics, empires, and cities, and to have them note how
fragile, temporary, and full of illusion is any appearance
of stability. The reality underneath is the force and power
of human ambitions, fears, hopes, and desires for fame.
In light of this simile any place that lastS for generations
with both splendor and decency should be looked at with
particular attention. God knows what blood was behind
Rome; it still remains a fact that this empire lasted as
a place of law for an enormous stretch of time. St. Paul,
a ] ew from Tarsus, demanded his rights as a Roman
citizen, and hence was not tortured. The thousand years
of the Most Serene Republic of Venice stand in front of
us as a monument of probity and sagacity. It was certainly for an enormous stretch of time ihe best place to
live and work in, and the best place to look at. It was
the hub of a commercial empire, as was Athens. Both
the Parthenon and St. Mark's Square are the most spendid and shining things to see and to visit. They are longlived memorials, though the increasing pollution of time
has eroded their surfaces. Can the look of them tell us
of Venice's long life and Athens' brief glory? As memorials
they affect us more than words, and seem to speak to
something apart from both them and us, a vision of a
place to be cherished. In this they resemble the funeral
oration of Pericles. Thucydides, however, puts us on
guard against reading too much into such appearances
in the famous passage in Book I:
For if the city of the Lacedaemonians should be deserted,
and nothing should be left of it but its temples and the
foundations of its other buildings, posterity would, I
think, after a long lapse of time, be very loath to believe
that their power was as great as their renown. (And yet
they occupy two-fifths of the Peloponnesus and have the
hegemony of the whole, as well as of their many allies
outside; but still, as Sparta is not compactly built as a
city and has not provided itself with costly temples and
other edifices, but is inhabited village-fashion in the old
Hellenic style, its power would appear less than it is.)
Whereas, if Athens should suffer the same fate, its power
would, I think, from what appeared of the city's ruins,
be conjectured double what it is. (I-X, 2-3).
My geological simile came to me in the course of
reading Thucydides' account of the revolution, or more
properly, the civil war that occurred on Corcyra, the
deeds committed in that island's internal eruption bear-
ing every resemblance to the deeds committed in the
Spanish War. In his account of the happenings on Corcyra Thucydides regards the larger more general war between Athens and Sparta as the catalyst which releases
the convulsions of party and faction. Every city has within
it democrats and oligarchs, but now the democrats can
call upon Athens and the oligarchs upon Sparta. This
fact brings to the surface something which Thucydides
dares call human nature:
And so there fell upon the cities on account of revolutions many grievous calamities, such as happen and
always will happen while human nature is the same, but
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which are severer or milder, and diflt:rent in their
manifestations, according as the variations in circumstances present themselves in each case. (III
LXXXII-2).
This sentence has the chilling precision of a scientific appraisal of phenomena, presenting a general rule which
may be applied to the variables of the given case. Thucydides then applies it in detail to the particular situation on Corcyra:
The ordinary acceptation of words in their relation to
things was changed as men thought fit. Reckless audacity
came to be regarded as courageous loyalty, prudent hesitation as specious cowardice, moderation as a cloak for
unmanly weakness. (III LXXXII -4).
Words given as oaths lost all coinage, and under the banners of "political equality under law for the many" and
"temperate aristocracy" everyone marched to his own
tune. People who joined neither party were immediately
under suspicion "either because they would not make
common cause with them, or through mere jealousy that
they should survive." Another universal statement about
human nature occurs almost at the end of this section
on Corcyra:
At this crisis, when the life of the city had been thrown
into utter confusion, human nature, now triumphant
over the laws, and accustomed even in spite of the laws
to do wrong, took delight in showing that its passions
were ungOvernable, that it was stronger than justice, and
an enemy to all superiority. (III LXXXIV-2).
The section concludes with words which the author later
puts into the mouths of the Melians in their famous fictive dialogue with the Athenians:
Indeed, men do not hesitate, when they seek to avenge
themselves upon others, to abrogate in advance the common principles observed in such cases-those principles
upon which depends every man's own hope of salvation
should he himself be overtaken by misfortune-thus failing to leave them in force against the time when perchance a man in peril shall have need of some of them.
(III LXXXIV-3).
T
his lecture cannot have the brashness and passion
inspired by an event which roused my conscience
in high school, and which I found reflected in my
experience as a soldier in Italy during the second world
war. In Italy again, when I learned to see clearly, there
was a civil war going on under my nose, a country torn
internally with horrors being committed under the banners of party, and the whole of the mess fusing and coming to the fore under the catalyst of the great world war
between the Germans and the Allies. Instead this lecture is about the book, or rather the memorial, which
puts such contemporary events into focus for me.
3
�Thucydides states that this indeed was his intention in
writing such a history:
But whoever shall wish to have a clear view both of the
events which have happened and those which will some
day, in all human probability, happen again in the same
or a similar way- for these to adjudge my history profit-
able will be enough for me. And, indeed, it has been
composed, not as a prize essay to be heard for the mo-
ment, but as a possession for all time. (lXXII -4 ).
Such a book and such an attempt intend to make memory
for the future. All battlefields and all wars want
monuments. It is unbearable to think of all that blood
shed and forgotten. Speeches after a battle on a battlefield
must assert the worth and the fame of what has been
accomplished by the dead. Only too often they are halflies about the Fatherland, or an invocation to the God
of Battles for help in the future or a praise to him for
the victory. At their best they call on Providence to help
in binding up the wounds so unhestitatingly opened.
Thucydides' whole enormous book is a discourse intended
to memorialize. It is a landscape with no gods or God
or Providence either in the sky above or under the earth
in some law court in Hell. The author is enormously fussy
about facts, but the book is no chronicle. Certain events
are looked at with a particular intensity in view of the
purpose of the memorial, and so that the book may be,
if not the education of Greece, an aid to the clear seeing
of all who read it. About the speeches in the book Thucydides says the following:
As to the speeches that were made by different men,
either when they were about to begin the war or when
they were already engaged therein, it has been difficult
to recall with strict accuracy the words actually spoken,
both for me as regards that which I myself heard, and
for those who from various other sources have brought
me reports. Therefore the speeches are given in the
language in which, as it seems to me, the several speakers
would express, on the subjects under consideration, the
sentiments most befitting the occasion, though at the
same time I have adhered as closely as possible to the
general sense of what actually was said. (l-XXII-1).
I
n this book which lays claim to being a "possession
for all time" we must ask ourselves which the speeches
are present-what part they play in the artful composition of this book. It is clear that spoken words are
of crucial importance to Thucydides when the words are
public, when they are directed toward future action, and
when they issue from the mouths of certain men. Sometimes, however, the speakers are nameless; they are designated merely as "the Athenians;' or "the Corinthians."
And once in the book the speeches are part of a fictive
dialogue between the people of Melos and these nameless
are judging concerning the future; such would be
speeches made before a deliberative assembly. There are
speeches made before people who are judging concerning the past; such would be speeches made in a court
oflaw by a lawyer in front of a judge or a jury. Finally
there are speeches mainly concerned with the present,
eulogies perhaps, where the judges often are critics or
appreciators of the speaker's words. These three types
are formally spoken of a deliberative, forensic, and
epideictic rhetoric. The business of deliberative speeches
is to exhort and persuade concerning future actions, and
the reason for the talking, the end at which it is aiming
in its persuasion, is the expedient or the harmful. Will
it further the ends of the Athenian state to slaughter the
entire population of M ytilene or not? Thucydides gives
us two speeches on this matter, one from the mouth of
Cleon, a demagogue, which argues for the killing, and
one from the mouth ofDeodatus, an otherwise unknown
man in the histories, which argues against the killing.
Both speeches argue from expediency, and as such fall
precisely within the definition of a deliberative speech
as rhetoric aimed at the useful or the harmful. While
we may lament the lack of any talk of justice in the
speeches of Cleon and Deodatus, Deodatus' speech saves
the lives of the people ofMytilene. It is intended by the
author that we take careful note that the best speech on
expediency saves the population of an entire city.
The business of forensic rhetoric is to accuse or de-
fend, its time the past, its end the just and the unjust.
Was Alcibiades guilty of impiety in the scandal of the
desecration of the Hermes? If this were not cleared up,
the doubt would spoil his efficacy in the minds of the
assembly however much they had been moved by his
speech concerning their future. Did Mr. Nixon do the
right thing in lying? That again was judged, and the outcome had much to do later with the future. What I mean
to say here is that though speeches concerning past actions, which have to do with justice, are distinct from
deliberations concerning the future, which have to do
with expediency, we all wear two hats in such matters.
If in our judgement]oe did lie or did, in fact, steal, we
are not going to listen to him with any particular confidence when he advises us concerning the future, how-
ever prudently he may speak. ] ustice counts for
something. The business of the epideictic is praise or
blame, and it is most generally concerned with the present; its end is the noble or the disgraceful. At the end
of this lecture we will examine the most famous of all
epideictic speeches, Pericles' Funeral Oration.
In deliberative speeches the judges are immediately
concerned with the subject at hand. It is, after all, their
lives, their wealth, their fears, and their honor which are
at stake in an assembly which is debating a future action. One would expect them to be more critical and
''Athenians:' It will be helpful, and it is easy enough,
suspicious given this fact. Given this frame of mind, the
personal character of the speaker assumes a much greater
following Aristotle, to divide speeches in general into
three types. There are speeches addressed to people who
importance than it does in forensic pleading. Who and
what kind of a man Pericles is, has much to do with his
4
SPRING 1984
�persuasiveness. At the conclusion of Pericles' third speech
in Book II Thucydides states this with perfect clarity:
And the reason for this was that Pericl~s, who owed his
influence to his recognized standing and ~bility, and had
proved himself clearly incorruptible in the highest
degree, restrained the multitude while respecting their
liberties, and led them rather than was led by them,
because he did not resort to flattery, seeking power by
dishonest means, but was able on the strength of his high
reputation to oppose them and even provoke their wrath.
(II-LXV-8).
The same holds true, however, for Alcibiades; character
counts, both for and against. Once the enthusiasm for
his youth and brilliance have had time to cool off, doubts
of his virtue enter the assembly's mind, and he is relieved
of his command. As a result the disastrous Sicilian campaign begins its downward plunge. Part of the study of
power and politics, of things as they are, is the study of
how people are persuaded to action. What rhetoric does
is part of the truth of the way things are.
The very first speech in the histories begins with the
word "dikaion'!- it is fair or just. You may remember the
situation. The Corinthians are trying to prevent the
Athenian fleet from joining that of Corcyra, as this would
hamper them in settling the war as they wish to settle
it. An assembly is called, and first the Corcyreans and
then the Corinthians speak. The first sentence of the Corcyreans, which, as we have noted, begins with the expression "it is fair;' is a most complex sentence:
It is but fair, citizens of Athens, that those who, without
any previous claims on the score of important service
rendered or of an existing alliance, come to their neighbors to ask aid, as we do now, should show in the first
place, if possible, that what they ask is advantageous,
or at least that it is not hurtful, and in the second place,
that their gratitude can be depended on; but in case they
establish neither of these things clearly, they should not
be angry if unsuccessful. (I-XXXII-!).
The intent of the Corcyreans, which governs the device
they employ in this sentence, is to establish the reasonableness of what they want. Facts must be faced, and dismissed if they prove to be a hindrance. The fact is that
the Corcyreans have no existing alliance with, nor have
they rendered any important service to, Athens; in fact
they are a colony of Corinth, hence the opening section
of the sentence. Given this embarrassing fact, it must
be shown that what is asked is "xumphora'!- advantageous, or at least not harmful- and that the gratitude
of the Corcyreans might even offer a certain security. The
final reasonable appeal is that if none of the above can
be established, no one's feelings are to be hurt. It is clear,
even if it is not just, that the important persuasive word
must be "advantage;' and that other things that might
bind a political action, such as an alliance or ties of blood
with the motherland, must be glossed over in light of"advantage's" claims. The speech continues with an insistence
upon the changed fact of the Corcyreans' isolation in
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
foreign policy. What had been formerly considered discretion is now viewed as unwise and a cause of weakness. They then hold out to the Athenians the pleasing
package of both honor and advantage, honor in helping
one who is wronged, and advantage in having as an ally
a great sea power. They argue that the Spartans through
fear are eager for war, and that the Corinthians are abetting this fear. They then brush aside the illegality of an
alliance with them (the Spartans and the Athenians are
at this point allied, as you may recall) with a legal argument that has a certain petty rigor, and finally end their
speech with the strongest set of appeals to expediency
that they can muster. First they argue that if they have
more strength the Spartans will be still more afraid of
breaking the truce; second they appeal to the commercial and imperial passions of Athens by pointing out the
convenience of Corcyra, situated as it is so conveniently
for a voyage to Italy and Sicily, and third they tote up
a calculus of the naval power of Greece. There are three
major navies, Athens, Corinth, and Corcyra. Two is more
than three. Don't be stuck with only your own.
The Corinthians in their rebuttal take up one by one
the arguments of the Corcyreans. They argue that the
contingency of a war in which the Corinthians fight with
the Athenians is still most uncertain, and that to be
stampeded by such fear will be to make a real enemy
of the Corinthians; this then /will be a fact, and not a
contingency. Also, and most pointedly, the Athenians of
all people should not tamper 0ith colonies and allies; the
whole life of their city depends on its network of rule
abroad. After the two speeches the Athenians in a second session of the assembly go along with the Corcyreans, though all during the first assembly they are
for Corinth. They make, however, a defensive alliance
only, promising mutually to aid each other in case of attack. The Athenians believe that the war has to be faced,
and do not want to give up the navy of the Corcyreans.
Also they have done a calculus- or gambled on a probability- that the two navies, of the Corinthians and the
Corcyreans, will wear each other out, and hence Corinth will be weaker when war comes. And too the island
does indeed seem so beautifully situated for a voyage to
Italy and Sicily.
oth speeches are made before an assembly of
judges who are debating a course of action future
to them. The principal word in the vocabulary is
certainly expedience as regards future benefits, and this
is always contrasted with the harm that would result from
not calculating on proper self-interest. Fairness and
honor, fear and anger, figure also in this vocabulary, and
each person in the assembly must be consulting his own
desires and hopes and fears for the future. For us, the
readers, these speeches are very different in meaning.
We know, as did Thucydides, that the war will go on for
mofe than a generation, that Athens will lose, that the
society and world of the Greek cities will be debased by
B
5
�the war, that words having to do with probity, honor, and
justice will be tarnished. We are also perfectly aware that
it will not be the end of the world~ as can so easily happen to our world right now, but that it will be the end
of a kind of world in which certain cherished things somehow maintained themselves by tradition, luck, and guts
against the desolation of the barbarian periphery. In other
words, for us they are not deliberative speeches in that
they refer to a future which we the judges do not know.
We judge them not from their expediency or harmfulness
to us, but as judges judging a past event. We are concerned with the just and the unjust, the good and the
bad, and we accuse or defend the Athenians or the people of Melos, the Spartans or the noble defenders of
Plataea, as we look back and down upon their speeches,
knowing what their future is to be. They are for us
writing samples open to our inspection; we are critics
or appreciators or unabashed admirers.
Later in Book I the Athenians give a speech which
we the readers must closely examine. The occasion is a
general council of the allies in Sparta after the hostilities
up at Potidea have been going on for quite a time. The
Corinthians have been hard at work in a preceding
speech, stirring up the Spartans, inciting them to war.
In their speech they have praised the Athenians' resourcefulness and derided the Spartans' old-fashioned habits.
They have even put forth a general rule, stating it
categorically and introducing it with the word "necessity" (anangke ): "it is necessary that things coming after
other things prevail!' A more vivid translation would be
"The new must by the nature of things take over:' In our
role as onlookers and critics of the speech it is easy enough
for us to appreciate the reason the Corinthians have for
saying this, and even the effectiveness of stating it as a
law. The Spartans are stick-in-the-muds, and have to be
brought to their senses in a world that has changed and
that is more quick in its wits than they. If we, as readers,
are more than appreciators, we must ask ourselves if the
proposition is true; does it have any valid~ty as a law, or
persuasive power because we think it's scientific? On
another level of meaning we are aware that Corinth is
in many ways the same kind of place as Athens, commercial, rich, a port, and ancient.
The Athenians, who according to Thucydides happened by chance to be present, asked for permission to
speak. They wanted to slow down the Spartans and to
show the great power of their city, reminding the older
men of what they knew, and telling the younger ones what
they didn't know, believing that their words would direct
the Spartans toward peace rather than war. Their opening sentences should put us, the readers, on guard as to
what is being done. The Athenians submit that they are
not going to answer any charges or speak to the Spartans as if the Spartans were a jury deciding on matters
of justice or injustice, but are only going to speak to them
in order to dissuade them from making a wrong decision regarding the future. The record, on the other hand,
still must be set straight. ''As for all the words against
6
us, we want to show that we have what we have in a manner that is not unseemly and that our city is worthy of
being talked about:' The next paragraph in their speech
brings up the great event of fifty years ago, the Persian
War. There is one acid sentence in this paragraph, which
employs the perennial pair, actions and words, erga and
logoi. The sentence may be rendered as follows: "When
we did these things" (the Athenians are speaking of their
part in defeating the Persians) "when we did these things,
they were risked for the sake of a common benefit, and
since you had a piece of the action, we will not be
deprived of the words that give us credit, if indeed there
is any benefit in that." The sentence revolves like a snake
about the word "benefit:' A freer translation might be
as follows: "We did these things and suffered danger for
a common good; since you received a share of that work,
we will not be deprived of the account of what we did,
if indeed there is any good or profit in an account:' The
word logos, "account;' at the end of this sentence is
delivered with cutting irony. Its meaning might be
rendered as "lip-service':_ the homage that words pay to
action. Of course the actions the Athenians are talking
about are gone into in detail in the next part of the speech.
They are the glorious triumphs at Marathon and Salamis,
events which we memorialize as model triumphs of
civilization over barbarism, triumphs which the Athenians point to as being a benefit to the Spartans as well
as to themselves.
The next paragraph then asks the question of worthiness. ''Are we then deserving of hatred and jealousy
merely because of empire, or rule?" This is the crucial
fact to be dealt with in any dealing with the Spartans.
Thucydides has given as the underlying cause of the war
the fear the Spartans had of Athens' rule or empire, and
now the Athenians must speak to this fact of empire and
rule; they must demonstrate that it is natural and inevitable, and hence not blameworthy. They begin by
arguing that it was according to the necessity of the work
itself that they were driven to extend their rule, and that
they were under the push exerted by fear, honor, and
lastly self-interest. To quote exactly: "It was under the
compulsion of circumstances that we were driven at first
to advance our empire to its present state, influenced
chiefly by fear, then by honor also, and lastly by selfinterest as well:' Later in the paragraph they say "No man
is to be blamed for making the most of his advantages
when it is a question of the gravest dangers." The argument here might be stated as follows: if anyone in the
world would behave in a certain way given the appropriate circumstances, no blame follows for an individual who does behave in such a way. Certainly a very
familiar and only slightly sleazy inference. The argument
then turns to the named individual in a way we are all
accustomed to, saying that "you;' namely the Spartans,
would have done the thing as we had if you had been
in our shoes. The next stage is to pull in normalcy of
behavior under a more telling name, "human nature."
'Thus there is nothing remarkable or inconsistent with
SPRING 1984
�human nature in what we also have done, just because
we accepted an empire when it was offered us, and then,
yielding to the strongest motives- honor, fear, and selfinterest (the list now begins with honor and not fear, you
will note)-we declined to give it up:' 'The next step is
to move from normalcy of behavior to a general law,
hence the next sentence: "Nor again, are we the, first who
have entered upon such a course, but it has always been
laid down that the weaker are hemmed in by the stronger:'
The adverb in the argument has moved from "usually"
to "always!' We have now not an observation of normal
behavior but a binding law of universal action.
The next job to be done in this most central of all
paragraphs is to eliminate any principle or universal idea
which will conflict with the principle of the strong lording it over the weak. This is done slyly and personally,
with the intention of shaming any listener who clings to
such notions.
We [the nameless Athenians say] thought ourselves
worthy to rule, and you shared that opinion, until you
began toting up and calculating your own interests, and,
just as you are doing now, began resorting to talk of
justice ['t6 0tKnt6 Aoy6 ], which no one in his right mind
ever put in front of force and advantage when opportunity gave him the chance of getting something by sheer
strength. (I LXXVI-2).
The grand reversal from blame to praise now follows,
encompassing all that has been said, and carefully placing the small hand of justice into the muscular grasp of
power:
They are worthy of praise who, being subject to human
nature as ruling over us, are more just than they might
have been, considering their possession of power. We believe that anyone else, seeing our power, would demonstrate most clearly, as to whether we are walking a
moderate path; in our case, however, from the very fact
of our reasonableness, blame rather than praise arises
in a most unfitting manner. (I LXXVI -4 ).
This passage in this speech is of crucial importance to
the whole book. The Athenians are explicating their
power and rule. Their speech is an apology for empire,
and contains an argument based on what is claimed to
be a universal law, a law present in human nature, namely
that the strong rule the weak. In the immediate context
of Book I the speech is unsuccessful. The Spartans decide
that the treaty is broken and that the Athenians are to
be blamed, and decide to go to war with Athens. There
is some doubt that the speech was ever made; it seems
clear that Thucydides placed it here and composed it as
part of his explication and memorial of the war. Its propositions are present in the words of Pericles in later
speechs in the book. They are very much present in the
terrifying debate on the fate of the population of
Mitylene. They are the substance of the Athenian talk
in the so-called Melian Dialogue.
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
eaning, in even the simplest of contexts and
situations, has as many layers as an onion. This
is in no way intended to imply that the situation or the context determines the meaning, but tather
that the context or the situation is the occasion for meaning. Who is talking and why? Is it Pericles or Cleon or
Alcibiades or Nicias talking, and why do they say what
they say about the war or about an expedition to Sicily?
What kind of men are they- noble, ambitious, brilliant,
or moderate? Are they talking to a popular assembly,
or to a gathering of aristocrats? What kind of relation
have they to the assembly, or the soldiers, or the aristocratic gathering, or their neighbors? What are they up
to? Why does Pericles want the war? It can hardly be
for the same reasons that Clean or Alcibiades are driven
by, though both might use the same arguments concerning power and justice. Are any of the sentences true statements of the way things are? In the case of this invented
speech we have just examined there are still further layers
of meaning for us. We are an audience separated by an
enormous gulf of time from the author. Why he has the
Athenians say what they say when they say it, and
whether what they say is true or not, must be part of
the meaning to us. It would be only too easy to nod one's
head and, calling a spade a spade, assent to the propositions concerning power and human nature, the strong
ruling the weak, and the weakness of the good. Is it that
our very nodding our heads in assent to such propositions is part of the truth of the propositions? Does it reveal
something of what we are when we do assent to them?
Does rhetoric reveal the other side of being, the dark side,
the shabby side, the reverse side of the coin? Is part of
this dilemma embodied in that famous red-herring of
a term, human nature? I have heard persons of good
character sagely affirm that the Melians were wrong in
not knuckling under to the Athenians. It is a fact that
they were all slain and their city extirpated, and the
ground it stood on plowed under. The truth is that their
deaths only demonstrate the weakness of the good, not
·that they were wrong. I take this to be Thucydides' meaning, and it is with the darkest irony that he puts into the
Athenians' mouths in the speech we have just looked at
the harsh reference to just discourse, ( dikaios logos), their
attempt being to shame the Spartans for resorting to such
talk, to taunt them for their lack of manliness. I will read
the sentence again:
M
And at the same time we thought ourselves worthy to
rule, and you shared that opinion, until you began toting
up and calculating your own interests, and, just as you
are doing now, began resorting to talk of justice, which
no one in his right mind ever put in front of force and
advantage when opportunity gave him the chance of getting something by sheer strength (I LXXVI-2).
If we can be bamboozled by shame into knuckling under
to these propositions about force and power; then the propositions become operationally true.
7
�It is very popular in all ages to dismiss just discourse,
and you may recall Aristophanl'!s' bitter satire in the
Clouds, where just and unjust di'scourse parade their
arguments in front of the audience of Athenian citizens,
an audience full of the presence of the endless Peloponnesian War.
Pericles' Funeral Oration in Book II of the histories
is the world's most famous speech, and it is in praise of
the world's most memorable city. This speech is carefully
positioned in front of the most famous description of a
disease in literature, the great Plague of Athens. It is so
carefully positioned in the structure of the histories that
a former tutor, with his customary irony, used to insist
that the plague never happened. By this I gather he meant
that it was too patently plotted into the literary scheme
of the histories. Terrible and terrifying pairs are placed
in front of us, a juxtaposition oflight, life, and freedom
under law next to darkness, death, and anarchy. Both
the Funeral Oration and the account of the Plague have
been imitated or copied. You will recall Lucretius' Plague,
and we are all most familiar with the countless statesmen-like speeches which employ Pericles' oration as a
model.
There are in addition two other speeches of Pericles
in the book which frame the meaning of the funeral oration. The first one is in Book I, a speech in which he
urges the assembly to war. The other occurs after the
war has begun, and the city has suffered the plague. It
is because of the political aftermath of these events that
Pericles finds it necesary to give this speech, a speech
in which he urges the assembly to hold firm in its pursuance of the war. These two framing speeches, are of
course, deliberative speeches, delivered before the
assembly. They urge and advise concerning the future
course of action to be taken by the assembly, in contrast
to the Funeral Oration, which is a eulogy of the present
and shining spectacle of Athens.
The first paragraph of the first speech contains the
essence of practical decision-making, and as such comments ironically on a future which we, the readers, know:
I, 0 men of Athens, hold to the same judgement as
always namely that we must not yield to the Spartans,
although I well know that once engaged in the actual
work of warfare men are not actuated by the same passionate temper as they are when being persuaded to go
to war, but change their judgements according to what
happens. I also see that I must give you the same or
nearly the same advice I used to give you, and I insist
that those of you who are persuaded shall support the
common decision, even if we should fail, or, in the case
of success, claim no share in the good judgement shown.
For it is perfectly possible for the course of events to unfold irrationally and dumbly as it is for the calculations
of men; it is for this very reason that we lay the blame
on fortune for what turns out contrary to our calculations. (I-CXL-1).
We never deliberate about what we know, but about what
8
we don't know, and we don't know the future, and
especially the future of a war. We may hope for a felicitous
future, but hope is wishing for what rationally cannot
be counted on. There is a piercing logic in the classification of hope as a theological virtue, an excellence beyond
nature; for Thucydides, however, the word carries with
it an ever-present irony. A political decision is always
about the future, and aspires to be a contract. It can't
be a contract, however, for who will make it stick? What
is the binding rule, and if the rule is binding, who will
be the judge? It may be just as well that this is so, for
if the decision is for war, sticking to the decision may
bleed the city to death, or at the very least debase the
spirit and counterfeit the moral coinage.
Later in the speech Pericles goes on to insist that the
slightest concession to the Spartans will be read by them
as fear, whereas a downright refusal of their demands
means that they will treat the Athenians as equals. This
is a kind of argumentation that numbs us every day in
the discussions of deterrence and equal megatonnage.
Pericles throws this at the assembly as an imperative:
So make up your minds, here and now, either to take
their orders before any damage is done you, or, if we
mean to go to war-as to me seems best-do so with
the determination not to yield on any pretext, great or
small, and not hold our possessions in fear. For it means
enslavement just the same when either the greatest or
the least claim is imposed by equals upon their
neighbors, not by an appeal to justice but by dictation.
(I-CXLI-1).
You will note the force of the word slavery in the last
sentence, though there is no clear logical path to be followed from claiming that between equals the slightest
concession means slavery rather than injustice. It is cer-
tainly a normal phenomenon that neighboring states hate
each other. The nearer they are the greater the hate seems
to be, in a kind of inverse-force law whose terms are hate
and proximity. In Greece one has only to think of Thebes
and Plataea, Sparta and Argos, Athens and Corinth,
Athens and Thebes, or Athens and its even nearer
neighbors (regarded with even more intense hatred),
Megara and Aegina. This is one of the perpetual and
damning observations which Dante makes as he looks
at all the cities of Tuscany consuming each other in a
wrath which he can only describe in bestial terms. In
our own age we have only to cast our eyes on any part
of the globe to observe this phenomenon: Poland and
Russia, India and Pakistan, Iran and Arabia, Bolivia and
Paraguay, Chile and Ecuador, Russia and China, Vietnam and Cambodia, England and Ireland. Often the
hatred between neighbors grows up between states that
are somehow united- this happened between the North
and the South in our own United States, and the anguish
of Lebanon presents a spectacle of hatred and blood between every tribe and every sect of a variety of religions.
SPRING 1984
�hese hatreds are nearly ineradicable, and are a
part of the calculus of power. ~hey are present all
through the events of the history we are reading,
but they are never the cause of a major war. This is left
to the fear that exists between equals. While it was under
the aegis of the greater war that the The bans had finally
the satisfaction of seeing their nearest neighbors slaughtered one by one, that greater war arose from a fear between equals. Sparta and Athens are not near neighbors,
and are enormously different, one from the other. They
don't know or understand each other enough to be able
to hate. It is the fear between equals and the humiliation of being treated as an underling by someone who
is the same height as you are that is behind Pericles' statement. This is the heart of his appeal, and the goad to
the assembly's manliness. As Thucydides states over and
over again, a man or a state is more humiliated at being
treated unjustly by an equal than at being beaten or
cowed physically by someone patently bigger or stronger.
We ourselves for the past thirty years have seen an obscene
proliferation of nuclear arms spring like mushrooms from
the ground of fear between equals.
Any hope for the mere existence of the world lies in
an untangling of, or an accommodation to, this grotesque
calculus. And since the snarls caused by fear between
equals have never been untangled in the political affairs
of men, to hope for their dissolution may be irrational,
and even naive. Given the presence of fear and power,
reason staggers and redefmes itself. It becomes a calculus,
a rationalization arising out of the presence of fear and
power, and the word "irrational" comes to mean "imperfectly calculated:' It is for this reason that Hobbes,
the translator of Thucydides, must redefine the meaning of words, and base all meaning in the new and
mechanical psychology with its roots in the fear of war
and the presence of power. If I am driven, the fo'rces that
drive me must be analyzed, and a machine built to contain their energy and to ensure my life. In talking of
Thucydides, who is no systemizer, we must limit ourselves
to noting that in his gravest passages, when he discusses
and notes the events and writes down the speeches concerning the consideration-s we have been pointing to, he
employs the phrase "human nature."
In the next part of his speech Pericles totes up the
power and money of the Athenians. He notes that their
ability to act quickly, and to decide things with resilience
by means of their popular assembly. This he contrasts
with the complicated allied command structure of Sparta.
The Athenians' navy will be their security, and should
be their hope, as it was at Salamis, and with it they need
not fear for their land holdings; their strength lies in their
power, their commerce, and their drachmas. Given all
of these assets he hopes that Athens will prove superior.
This will only happen, he warns, if they do not attempt
to extend their empire while they are waging a war, or
weigh themselves down with other dangers of their own
making---!'for I fear more our own domestic mistakes than
the calculations of the enemy."
T
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
We, the readers, are well aware of the prophecy implied in this sentence, and after Pericles' third speech
Thucydides takes pains to point out the disasters that
followed Pericles' death. He lived only two years and six
months into the war, and without him Athens foundered,
just as under him it was great and glorious and entered
the path of war. The speech concludes by urging the
assembly to adjust in a strictly legal way their affairs with
the Spartans, but to do nothing upon dictation:
This answer is just and fitting for the city- but it
behooves us to know that the war is going to happen,
and that the more willing we show ourselves to accept
it, the less eager will our enemies be to attack us, and
also that from the greater dangers the greater honors
accrue both to a private man and to a state.
(I -CXLIV-3).
At the conclusion to the conclusion Pericles appeals to
the memory of their fathers, who withstood the Persians,
and who with a courage greater than their strength beat
back the barbarian and advanced their fortunes to their
present state. Thucydides comments, "The Athenians
thinking he was advising them for the best voted as he
told them to:'
It may be that a statesman has to act as if war were
inevitable, and see to it that the state is prepared. But
Pericles' argument to the assembly-that not only is war
inevitable but that the more we show ourselves prepared
to accept war, the less eager will our enemies be to accept it- is specious. To an enemy such as Sparta, an equal
in pride and strength, greater acceptance and
preparedness. on the part of the Athenians will mean
greater fear on the part of the Spartans, and thus greater
precautions. Out of that fear and preparedness will grow
further armament and further marshalling of allies, finally ensuring the truth of the proposition that war is
inevitable. It is apt to the point of slyness that the completion of Pericles' complex sentence contains the appeal
to the honor and excellence that accrue to a man and
a city from great dangers. He proceeds to buttress this
by appealing to the memory of the great patriotic war
waged against the Persian barbarians. This rhetorical induction from one war to another is false, as a war between Greeks and barbarian invaders has not the same
nature as a war between Greeks. It would be like arguing in this century from the nature of the First World
War of 1914, which in no way was worth the price of its
blood, to a position which would deny the moral necessity
of the war against Nazi Germany. An argument closer
to the present generation would contain the faulty inference that since the Second World War was honorable
to the nation, the war in Vietnam was also, and hence
should be pursued with vigor and moral certainty.
After the first speech of Pericles in Book I the war
begins. The Spartans invade the land of Attica. Pericles'
strategy has been to pull all of the population within the
walls, to abandon the countryside to the devastation of
9
�the invading Spartans, and to truSt in the navy, the empire, and the wealth of the city. Athens and Attica had
been inhabited continously for a length of time that
seemed mythical to its inhabitants. They were proud of
having been indigenous and co-eternal, as it were, with
the soil of Attica. Their habits and mores were attached
to the countryside, to their estates. The city of Athens,
though the center of Attica politically, was the traditional
center of this long-enduring and ancient countryside, and
had no existence apart from the land about. Pericles'
strategy changed all of this, and the whole countryside
crowded within the walls, squatting even within sacred
places. The Funeral Oration takes place during the winter
which closes the first year of war and the first invasion
of the land of Attica. The next summer the Spartans invaded the countryside again, and before they had been
many days in Attica, the Plague broke out. I shall quote
from Thucydides' account:
It is said, indeed to have broken out before in many
places, both in Lemnos and elsewhere, though no
pestilence of such extent nor any scourge so destructive
of human lives is on record anywhere. For neither were
physicians able to cope with the disease, since they had
to treat it without knowing its nature, the mortality
among them being greatest because they were most exposed to it, nor did any other human art avail. And the
supplications made at sanctuaries, or appeals to oracles
and the like, were all futile, and at last men desisted from
them, overcome by the calamity. (II-XLVII-4)
Thucydides then proceeds to inform the reader as to how
he will treat of this natural disaster:
Now anyone, whether physician or layman, may, according to his personal opinion, speak about its probable
origin and state the causes which, in his view, were sufficient to have produced so great a departure from
normal conditions; but I shall describe its actual course,
explaining the symptoms from the study of which a persons should be best able having knowledge of it beforehand, to recognize it if it should ever break out again,
For I had the disease myself, and saw others sick of it.
(II -XLVII -3).
This passage cannot help suggesting to us, the readers,
that Thucydides intends to write about the Plague in the
same way that he writes about the war. He had the disease
and saw others sick of it just as analogously he was an
admiral in the war, was exiled, and examined it then from
a distance. He next describes in detail the physical nature
of the Plague, and finally turns to the moral desolation
which resulted from it:
And no one was eager to practice self-denial in prospect
of what was esteemed honor, because everyone thought
that it was doubtful whether he would live to attain it,
but the pleasure of the moment and whatever was in any
way conducive to it came to be regarded as at once
honorable and expedient. No fear of gods or law of men
restrained; for, on the one hand, seeing that all men were
perishing alike, they judged that piety and impiety came
10
to the same thing, and, on the other, no one expected
that he would live to be called to account and pay the
penalty of his misdeeds. (II-LIII -4 ).
It is difficult not to compare this passage with the one
which details the horror of the civil war on Corcyra,
which Thucydides so clinically describes both as to its
symptoms and to its progress. The attempt is to describe
something so that it may be recognized if encountered
again. In comparing the Plague with the civil war that
broke out everywhere in Bellas there are differences to
be noted- the Plague may have been carried by rats, a
natural cause, whereas the civil war arose from human
causes. Are human causes a branch of the natural, and
are we obligated to employ the term "human nature?"
If both are diseases, justice becomes medicine, assuming the meaning so common to it in the dialogues of Plato.
he Athenians now suffered a change of feeling·s.
They blamed Pericles for having persuaded them
to go to war. Their land had been invaded for the
second time; the Plague had decimated the population.
The Athenians even sent envoys to the Spartans pleading
for peace, but accomplished nothing. "Being at their wits'
end, they assailed Pericles. . . . He called a meeting of
the assembly- for he was still general-wishing to reassure them, and by ridding their minds of resentment to
bring them to a milder and less timorous mood:' Pericles'
third speech is then framed to meet this occasion. For
us, the readers, it may be the saddest of his speeches.
The war which he had argued for has begun. The glorious city which had reached its zenith under his leadership has just suffered the Plague. The anger and fear of
the people have to be faced down, and the peace movement quelled. He has to ride the back of his tiger and
find words to fit the situation. He begins by saying that
he has expected this anger, and will show them that they
have no reason to be angry with him, or to give way to
their misfortunes. A man's private misfortunes are
worsened by the state's disasters, so it would be folly to
sacrifice the state's security because of troubles at home.
You're blaming both me and yourselves, he says, who
voted after all for the war. I am as competent a man as
you'll find, free from influence of money, and a good
patriot. If you believed me once, believe me now.
Next he waves in front of their eyes the banner of near
infinite rule and power, something, as he says, he had
been loath to do before, as it is almost unseemly and
boastful· to do so. Seeing them so cast down, however,
he will raise their spirits.
T
You think that it is only over your allies that your empire extends, but I declare. that of two divisions of the
world which lie open to man's use, the land and the sea,
you hold the absolute mastery over the whole of one,
not only to the extent to which you now exercise it, but
also to whatever fuller extent you may choose; and there
is no one, either the Great King or any nation of those
SPRING 1984
�on the earth, who will block your pqth as you sail the
seas with such a naval aramament as,you now possess.
(II-LXII-2).
That is, of course, Pericles speaking, nbt Alcibiades urging the conquest of Sicily.
You can go forth, he says, to meet your enemies not only
with confidence but with contempt. For contempt
belongs properly to the man who is persuaded by his
own judgement that he is superior to his opponent. Such
is our case. . . . Fortune being equal, this intelligent
scorn renders courage more secure, in that it doesn't trust
so much in hope, which is strongest when you're at a loss,
as in well-founded opinion, opinion founded on the facts
of the case, which is a lot surer as far as the future is
concerned. (II-LXII -4).
These words of Pericles' find their final home in the
mouths of the nameless Athenians as they present their
view in the fictive dialogue with the Melians:
Hope is indeed a solace in danger, and for those who
have other resources in abundance, though she may injure, she does not ruin them, but for those who stake
their all on a single throw- hope being by nature
prodigal- it is only when disaster has befallen that her
true nature is recognized, and when at last she is known,
she leaves the victim no resource wherewith to take
precautions against her in future. (V-CIII).
They later butcher the people of Melos, and existentially
demonstrate the truth of their words.
The next words of Pericles follow a kind of scenario
that might be summed up as follows: look at the truth,
the facts, shiver, and then gird up your loins; don't be
so fatuous as to play at being good, rather become
famous. Every one hates you because of the empire, but
"it is far too late to back off, even if someone in the present hour of danger wants to play the "good man" by
shrinking from public actions." The verb in this s~ntence
which carries the weight of the scorn is andragathidzetaifrom aner and agathos---.!'play the good or honest man."
Pericles continues:
The empire you possess is a tyranny, which it may seem
unjust to have taken on, but which certainly would be
dangerous to let go of. Such good and honest men would
ruin a state either right here, if they could persuade
others of their point of view, or if they went to found
another city all of their own- men of peace who refrain
from politics preserve nothing unless they are accompanied by men of action; it is no benefit in a ruling city
but only in a vassal state, to submit for the sake of safety.
(II - LXIII).
The speech ends with an exordium to the assembly to
act heroically. They are men, and Homer was their
mentor:
Anyone who has aspired to rule over others has been
hated; but anyone who, aiming high, accepts this hate,
is well advised. (II-LXIV-5 ).
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The Greek adverb in this sentence is orth6s, "getting things
straight!' The author then comments: "Speaking in this
way Pericles tried to purge the Athenians of their anger
towards him and to channel their minds away from the
present evils:' (II-LXV-1).
e, the readers, have now to attempt to step back
and test the meaning of this speech from our
numbing distance of over 2000 years, a span
approaching the everlasting memory Pericles speaks of
to the Athenians. The speech is enshrined in this book
designed by the author as a possession for all times. Are
there true propositions, bona-fide laws, stated in this or
in other speeches in this book, laws which stand and hold
as universal laws of power and politics? Or are the statements exposed to our attention by Thucydides merely
the sort of thing which is always said and always will be
said in order to persuade an assembly or a senate or a
prince when he is deliberating concerning a future course
of action? Is it true that the stronger rule the weaker,
and that he who rules will be hated? If it's true, must
Pericles say it to the assembly? If he does say it to the
assembly as a means of rousing them to continued warfare, will they then act in such a way as to bring it about
that they are hated even if they weren't before? Do words
aimed at the heart and passions of a people sink in to
such an extent that they become the mainsprings of their
actions, and become to all intents and purposes true? If
Pericles, certainly as good a politician as one will ever
get, finds it necessary to speak scathingly about men
wanting to be good and hence not paying attention either
to their own or to the state's benefit, what manly man
will choose to be "good"? The later shadow of the Gorgias
and the hero Callicles loom large in our minds as we read
these speeches. If at the end of the Gorgias justice and
right obtain only in the dark underworld court of Rhadamanthus, it is because the good and right do not rule
in the desolation of the landscape of power. It would be
a shameless naivete to conceive of any of Plato's political
works as arising from any ground other than one of the
blackest pessimism regarding human affairs. It is true
that he wrote after the Peloponnesian Wars, but that war
does not, in itself, account for what he said any more
than it accounts for what Thucydides said. The war was
an occasion, first for Thucydides and then for Plato, for
observing, for reflecting, and for setting things straight.
In both of them one feels the ache for, and the absence
of, an efficacious good, and while Socrates may speak
of himself as the only true citizen of Athens, Thucydides
the Athenian has put into the mouths of his Athenians
words that fix forever in our memory the inexorable grind
of power, time, and moral decline.
It remains now to speak of the most famous speech,
the Funeral Oration. As is so with many very famous
things, it turns out to be quite peculiar in many of its
features. The occasion for the speech is that "the Athenians, following the custom of their fathers, celebrated
W
11
�at the public expense the funeral\ rites of the first who
had fallen in this war;' and "a rna~ chosen by the state,
who is regarded as best endowed with wisdom and is
foremost in public esteem, delivers over them an appropriate eulogy."
Pericles begins his speech with the usual disclaimer
made by speakers on such occasions-who am I to praise
such men? Actions speak louder than words. The speaker
then attempts to give the best damn speech ever heard.
In this case he succeeds. After the customary opening
the speech takes on a rather sour note. The gist of what
follows is that those who know the dead and what they
did will think that scant justice is being done them by
the speaker, and those who did not know them and their
actions will think, out of envy, that the speaker has committed a gross exaggeration. Despite all this, he says, he
will say what he has to say.
Again, as is familiar and customary upon such occasions, the forefathers and the past are mentioned; again
the peculiarity is that, despite the enormous age and the
weight of custom and tradition in such an ancient city
as Athens, the forefathers are quickly passed over in favor
of the immediate past, the fathers of those in the audience
who acquired the empire, and those alive today who, in
the prime of their life, further strengthened this empire
so that it is well provided for both in peace and in war.
The speech then immediately turns to the City itself, and
becomes the most famous eulogy of the most famous city.
First the polity is praised; it is a democracy where all
are equal under the law in the settlement of disputes,
but where those who are distinguished are honored
regardless of class and wealth. Pericles then praises the
liberality of the town, its freedom from resentment and
back-biting, the vigor and pizzazz of its talk. It is also
a place with all kinds of relaxations, games and sacrifices,
fine buildings and proper houses, and it is so rich and
big that all the products of the earth flow into it. The
city is stronger now because it is freer in its training and
abhors secrecy. The citizen takes an interest at once in
both private and public things: "we are lovers of beauty
with the proper ends in mind, and lovers of wisdom
without softness."
What is of particular interest to us as we reflect on
the speeches is the next statement of Pericles, where he
praises the Athenians as being the most daring in action and at the same time as believing that debate is not
a hindrance to action; for most people boldness means
ignorance and reasoning causes delay. "In respect of virtue;' he says, "we differ from the many- for we acquire
our friends not by recieving good from them but by doing good. We alone confer benefits not by calculating
our own advantage so much as trusting in our own free
and liberal habits:'
If we pause for a moment in the midst of the praise
we realize that this speech is of course to be classified,
if we follow Aristotle's division, as a speech having to do
with the present; its business is to praise or blame, and
12
its aim is the noble or the disgraceful. All the other
speeches we have considered, the speeches of the Corcyreans and the Corinthians, the Athenians' speech to
the Spartans, and the two flanking speeches of Pericles,
had to do with deliberation about future events, and the
propositions embedded in them had all to do with the
exigencies of rule and power as applied to the benefit of
the state.
When we read the glowing praise of Athens' freedom
and liberality in this speech of praise, a facile judgement
might tend towards cynicism. After all, men of good sense
are always wary of exalted speeches, especially when they
issue from the mouths of statesmen on solemn occasions.
A part of prudence must always agree with Dr. Johnson's
dictum that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
In this century the very name "fatherland" sounds as a
nightmare when the memory of what was perpetrated
in its name crosses our consciousness.
What is our judgement now, and what are our feelings as the speech continues? One state:,rp.!=(nt rings so in
our memory as nearly to preclude judgement. Pericles
says, "Putting all this together I say to you that our whole
city is the education of Greece." (A more euphonious
translation speaks of the "School of Bellas:') The sentence
that contains this statement continues, however, as
follows:
And it seems to me that every single man amongst us,
could in his own person, with the greatest grace and versatility, prove hims.elf self-sufficient in the most varied
kinds of activity. Many are the proofs given of our power
and we do not lack witnesses, and we shall be the wonder
not only of men of today but of men of after-times. . . .
We shall need no Homer to sing our praise nor any other
poet whose verses may perhaps delight for the moment
but whose presentation of the facts will be discredited
by the truth. (II-XLI-1).
This is of course true, as we do all remember Athens
2500 years later.
Pericles then turns to the remains of the dead, and
says that it was for such a place that these men died.
Don't believe, he says, the advantages of such courage
by the mere words of a speaker when you yourselves
know as well as the speaker what is to be gained by warding off the enemy. Rather you must when you are about
your daily work, fix your gaze upon the power of Athens
and become lovers of her, and when she appears great
to you, consider that all this has been gained by courage.
(II-XLII!-1).
This is soon followed by another sentence so beautiful
that it is hard to look at it:
The whole world is the sepulchre of famous men, and
it is not the epitaph upon monuments set up in their
own land that alone commemorates them, but also in
lands not their own there abides in each breast an unwritten memorial to them, planted in the heart rather
than graven in stone. (II-XLIII-3).
SPRING 1984
�The eulogy becomes exhortation, and its charge may be
paraphrased as follows: "you have more to lose, hence
be unsparing of your lives, as the difference between your
present beloved splendor and a disaster: is enormous. The
more you have to love, the harder you should fight; ordinary folk have no place they passionately love, as you
do, a place so splendid, which shines in its might and
beautY:' The speech, whose occasion was the customary
eulogy over the first to die in battle, becomes the eulogy
of the city, not the city as a repository of old tradition
and habit, but the present city, replete with power and
beauty, standing in front of the citizen's eyes like the Parthenon on the hill, a love object of incomparable worth,
worth so much that there can be no hesitation in fighting
for her, as she is worth the price. The adoration of her
power becomes the heart of the matter. Beauty and power
are exhibited to the citizens, held up to them as love objects. Eros and Ares, Venus and Mars, are linked, and
the hope of immortal fame standing beyond the inevitable
future blood stirs them to heroic action. They have all
been brought up on Homer. The implicit argument may
be summed up as follows: major premise -lovers are
famous; minor premise- patriots are lovers; conclusion
-fight.
And fight they did. After Pericles' third speech
Thucydides carefully notes:
And yet, after they had met with disaster in Sicily, where
they had lost not only their army but also the greater
part of their fleet, and by this time had come to a state
of sedition at home, they nevertheless held out ten years
not only against the enemies they had before, but also
against the Sicilians, who were now combined with
them, and besides, against most of their allies, who were
now in revolt, and later on, against Cyrus, son of the
King, who joined the Peloponnesians and furnished
them with money for the fleet; and they did not finally
succumb until they had in their private quarrels fallen
upon each other and been brought to ruin. Such abundant grounds had Pericles at the time for his own forecast
that Athens might quite easily have triumphed in this
war over the Peloponnesians alone. (Il-LXV-12-13).
he fact remains that. they lost, and in that long
swath of wartime the words and arguments which
we have examined, which in peacetime might have
remained underground, in wartime came to the surface,
and became fixed and inexorable. They were used in the
assembly which debated the fate of the population of
M ytilene; they were present in the hearts of the Spartans as they led out the courageous citizens of Plataea
and slaughtered them one by one; they were dramatically
composed into the Athenians' dialogue with the Melians
before that population was eliminated. In this same swath
of time civil war erupted all over Greece, the paradigm
of it being the horror on Corcyra, where words changed
their meanings, and people became faceless, and words
became masks behind which the anarchy of the passions
paraded. The habits and customs of the past, the only
T
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
safeguard to be counted upon, crumbled, and the pure
present showed its face like the Gorgon's head.
Can the pure present of power and beauty waved like
a banner in the faces of the Assembly in the Funeral Oration inflame nobly? Is the vision seen worthy, and worth
such travail as the long years shift and pass? Patriotism
is infinitely more difficult for all of us who inhabit these
enormous modern nation-states; there's nothing to look
at. To be a patriot now one has to love a principle and
be willing to die for it, which is so different from gazing
upon a place, bounded by its fields, beautiful to look
upon, rich and marvelously racy to live in, full of ingenious and sharp-tongued people; a place where clearly
one lives a better life than one would anywhere else.
Can the present vision of a shining and glorious city,
the love object presented by Pericles, counter that other
present vision, the immediate anarchy and horror present in both the Plague and in the civil war on Corcyra?
Did Nicias see the same thing as Pericles? Does
Thucydides the Athenian see the same thing as Pericles?
Perhaps he does, but he frames the Funeral Oration with
the two speeches we have considered, and places it, in
his composition, directly in front of his account of the
plague. He also praises Nicias, dying far from Athens,
a failure at the end of a disaster, as the man who "least
deserved to meet with such a calamity, because of his
course of life that had been wholly regulated in accordance with virtue."
orne students with whom I read these speeches last
year felt thill the study of them and of this book led
to cynicism. This is to read what is intended as
irony wrongly. If no solution in human affairs is possible,
it is because nothing of heartfelt concern is a problem
that can be solved. If no solution is possible, human excellence calls for courage and shrewdness to walk hand
in hand with decency and compassion. They don't walk
hand in hand usually, and the best you can get is their
mutual awareness, one of the other. I was struck recently
by a documentary which I saw on television; it seemed
to me like an allegory of power and the good. In it two
women of extraordinary toughness and calculation were
exhibited to us, the viewers. The documentary was about
Mother Teresa, and the scene which stuck in my memory
was filmed in the grand audience chamber in New Delhi.
Mrs. Ghandi, that shrewd, tough, and resilient powerbroker, gave a medal honoring Mother Teresa to that
shrewd, tough, and resilient nun .. Mrs. Ghandi is the
ruler of the largest and most populous democracy in the
world, a nation-state that came into being in the midst
of one of those blood baths which our century is full of,
an event of such terrifying barbarity and slaughter that
ordinary descriptions of Hell seem painted in pastel, and
Corcyra seems a tempest in a teapot, in comparison. For
all that, the nation lurches on in its misery, guided and
coaxed and dictated to by Mrs. Ghandi. Mother Teresa
performs good works, and this is seen by any onlooker
S
13
�regardless of his faith or lack ther~of. It is hard to conceive that either woman, so aware Of the way things are,
expects anything to change in this world she is so much
in the midst of. Mrs. Ghandi, in addition to the parlous
state of her enormous nation, lives under the shadow of
the two monstrous powers with which she shares the continent, Russia and China. She lives also with the bloodhate of her nearest neighbor, Pakistan. Mother Teresa
lives in the midst of the most utter poverty and human
degradation in one of the great cities of the sub-continent.
In the television encounter one could see the hard, clear
glance of Mrs. Ghandi, but even more one could sense
the calculation behind the nun's eyes: was the minister
on the right good for a couple of ambulances, and was
the fat and powerful man on the left to be counted on
for a ton of medical supplies for the benefit of her hospital
for incurables in the heart of that ultimate human city,
Calcutta?
Via Positiva
Back home on a day this time of year
Sharp angled red-trunked trees stand
In a flat green field, new and fruitless,
Each articulate leaf cutting the air clear;
Down cellar where dark and cold are one
Deep baskets fill with roots and gourds,
Mold glitters on the step, damp webs
Softly shawl the ciderjugs and jams;
Past the creek where the hard water
Ducks on the cleaving rock and twists
Into shining braids slit with foam;
There sleep stones and people, slabs and angels;
Further on, after wall and hillside vault
Before mountains crest, a gap opens
Onto a plunging meadow faint with mist
Where ral{bits flash amid the warm still grass.
Gretchen Berg
14
SPRING 1984
�Via Negativa
The freeway inarticulate sea
Draws broken white spine and slurs
The cold haze with a shining edge.
What nimbus dares to charm and ride
From dirt toothed with uncertain traces
Pebbles and their alluvial shadows?
Brittle branches thorn dark streams,
Black ice reflective bridged
With a splintered board or none.
Pursy firs flicker and swerve
Their forked moss matting
An impasse in the blotted sky.
Sharp waters carve the instep's arch;
What name strikes blank air silent
To find no ear, be dumbfound?
I latecomer press my print
With others speechless wonders
Waiting to be spelled out.
Gretchen Berg
Gretchen Berg is a graduate of St. John's College, Annapolis. She
lives in Vermont where she pursues her interest in writing and
painting.
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
15
�Logos and The Underground
Curtis Wilson
AUTHOR'S PREFATORY NOTE
The lecture here printed was delivered in
September 1960 as the dean's 'opener: It is largely
based on Edmund Husserl's Erfahrung und Urteil,
which I worked my way through in the summer
of'60. When Mr. Sterling recently proposed printing the lecture in the Review) conscience told me
I should review the text, to determine whether
I could still endorse the propositions that I put
forward with such somber earnestness 25 years
ago. My conclusion has been both a Yes and a
No.
For the heroism of Husserl's repeatedly
renewed efforts to achieve a presuppositionless
'beginning' in philosophy, my admiration must
always remain. And the attempt to carry out
phenomenological description- the delineation
of how things (tables and chairs, words and sonnets and symphonies, universals like Justice; fictional characters like Sancho Panza, beings like
my cat, persons like the reader) present
themselves in awareness- has a value. In 1960
I considered the Husserlian descriptions as an
antidote to the self-defeating relativism that so
many freshman brought to the college: the pervasive disbelief in the possibility of improving
one's opinions, the bland assurance that your opinion is as good [or as bad?] as mine. Still today
I see as desirable an attentiveness to the
describable character of the things that present
themselves in awareness, just as they present
themselves-to echo the Husserlian phrase. It is
a mode of thoughtfulness that, in an age of reductive slogans, needs to be encouraged.
16
But concerning the Husserlian enterprise I
today have doubts that I had not quite formulated
25 years ago. The descriptions no longer appear
to me securely presuppositionless or selfexplanatory;
and
the
claim
that
phenomenological description constitutes "the
correct method" in philosophy seems to me far
too grand. "Man;' says Claude Bernard, "is by
nature metaphysical and proud;" and the
presumption of certainty seems to me more often
illusionary than not. Methods are useful or
necessary; but of method that claims to have an
exclusive right we must be wary, for any method
presupposes more than we are likely ever to know.
In short, if I have long known that we must begin
in medias res) I am no longer prepared to suppose
that the mind's improvement or the advance of
knowledge will consist in coming to an absolute
starting-point. The very process whereby we successively pronounce the words of a sentence while
intending a meaning seems to me utterly
mysterious, and I think it is a miracle that we
can begin at all.
This is not the place to pursue these thoughts.
(Let me only mention that today I would look
to linguistics and behavioral biology to throw new
light on the 'underground' of the liberal arts; and
I see it as a task for the future liberal artists to
explore with sensitivity the intricate dialectic between genotype and phenotype, between the deep
or hidden structures and what appears. This investigation would not presume to avoid
hypothesis; but insofar as hypothesizing
necessarily involves reduction, it would be cogni-
SPRING 1984
�n Platds dialogue Phaedo, Socrates speaks of
having, at a crucial turning-point of his life,
fled to the logoi. Previously, he says, ~e had pursued the investigation of natur~, seeking th~ <:fficient and final causes of the thmgs of the VlSlble
world. But this investigation having led to nothing that
he could trust he took flight to the logoi. What is
characteristic of Socrates, the Socratic questioning, takes
its start from this flight to the logoi.
The Greek word logos (plural: logoi) has a vari~ty of
meanings, but according to Liddell and Scott, Hs pnmary
meanings are, first, the word, or that by which ~he Inward thought is expressed, and second, the mward
thought itself. Additional and related meanmgs are: statement assertion definition, speech, discourse, reason.
Now I am ~ot going to give a commentary on this
passage in the Phaedo; but I wish to take a start fro~ the
observation that there IS such a thing as logos, meaningful
speech, speech which expresses the inward thoughL And
I am going to explore the questwn: What does this fact
presuppose? What underlies it?
.
I may as well warn you that I shall be attemptmg the
most pedestrian, prosaic, d~y s?rt of d~scnptwn and ~x
plication. I shall try to avmd zntroducznf? or constructzng,
hypotheses or theories, however attractive, which would
account for what is described. I shall try, on the contrary,
to describe certain kinds or types of things which are
recognizably involved in our speaking, and my effort will
be to delineate them just as they present themselves to
us, just as we are aware of t?e~. ~f there is a? ~ssump
tion in my procedure, I think 1t IS the conviCtiOn that
the "I" or self on the one hand, and the world on the other,
cannot be thought of separately. Accurate description of
my experience is description of the exp~rie~ce of al! "I"
or self in a situation, of a presence which IS essenttally
in the world and bound to the world. I shall have to
I
zant of the dangers thereof. The human spirit
is a 'tangled wing; to use Melvin Kanner's figure
for it, and I look to linguistics and biology, as
to the Bible and all deep literature, for the further elucidation of what we are and how we do
what we do.)
And what of the poor freshmen, for whom
the opening lecture of the college year is supposed
to be a kind of exhortation? I tremble to think
how widely my efforts must have missed the
mark; years afterward I was informed that it was
a standard bit of 'put-down' on the part of upperclassmen to tell the freshmen that they could
not expect to understand my lecture. But even
today I know not what verbal gestures might
count as useful, amidst the profusion and confusion of aims and ideas that freshmen arrive
with. How can I say, in one breath: (1) work patiently and hard, for the value of what you acquire will, in general, be proportional to the care
that goes into the acquiring; and (2) think! be
inventive! for what is in front of you can appear
in a new light, and discoveries are possible! but
(3) do not expect certainty? Ifi should say such
things, some of the brightest of my auditors
would find my sayings impossibly contradictory
in tendency, and the only response I could make
would be that I hope and believe it is not so. In
what puts itself forward as human knowledge,
it is by the care and thoroughness, and by the inventiveness and the unexpectedness that throws
a new light, that I attempt to distinguish the better from the worse. I know no other way.
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Curtis Wilson is a tutor and former dean at St. John's College, Annapolis. "Logos and the Underground" was origi~ally delivered as
the Dean's lecture inaugurating the 1960 academic year.
17
�analyze this experience into certain strata or levels, and
because of limitations of time, concentrate on certain fundamental strata which may, unfort~nately, seem to you
the least interesting.
.
In one respect I shall imitate the Socratic flight: I shall
leave out of account all results of natural science-physics,
chemistry, and biology. Over the past 350 years scientists have developed imposing structures of thought which
seem to reveal to us a previously hidden world, alongside
of or somehow behind or underneath the world in which
we live from day to day. Arthur Eddington would say,
for instance, that besides the apparent lectern behind
which I stand, there is another lectern, the real one, consisting of electrons and protons. I would maintain, on
the contrary, that this is an incorrect way of speaking
and thinking: there is only one lectern, the one that is
before me. What is meant by the electrons and protons
can only be understood by considering certain procedures
and experiments and the theories built up around them.
In seeking the roots of these theories I shall be led back
to the world of my everyday experience, and to the
language in which I formulate this experience. To ignore
the layered or storied structure within and underlying
scientific theories, to regard the electron as somehow on
a par with and alongside the table, is to commit what
Whitehead calls 'the fallacy of misplaced concreteness:'
So I shall begin with the analysis of everyday speech and
expenence.
Even here I must make a reservation. I am not trying to take account of all aspects of everyday speech. We
use speech to praise and to blame, to command and to
pray, or even for "whistling in the dark:' I shall be concerned only with the rather ordinary and colorless fact
that in our speaking we make statements, assertions,
which signify states of affairs, the "way things are;' as we
say.
he statement or assertion is the unit of fully
meaningful speech. A single word, outside
an assertion, does not have a fully determinate meaning. If I were to look and point in a certain
direction, and to shout "Firel", you would probably
recognize that I was asserting something. But the same
word "fire" in another context may have a quite different
meaning, for instance in the sentence, "The captain
ordered his men to fire." There are even subtler differences due to context. The meaning of the word "fire"
is not quite the same in the sentence "Civilization depends
on fire," and in the sentence, "The fire was burning brightly in the hearth:' Precisely what a word refers to depends
on the context in which it is used, which may be verbal
or non-verbal or both. But in any case, nothing is really
said until we have an assertion or statement-what traditional logic called the predicative judgment. What is
predicative judgment?
The word '(predication" comes from the Latin
"praedicare;' originally meaning to speak out, to enun-
T
18
ciate publicly. The word was later preempted by logicians in order to translate Aristotle's term katagorein. The
Greek word katagorein had originally meant to denounce,
to accuse in the marketplace or assembly (the root agora
means marketplace or assembly). Aristotle then appropriated the term to express the meaning: to say
something of a subject. What is spoken of, that about
which something is said, Aristotle calls the hypokimenon,
that is, the underlying; that which is said about or of
the hypokeimenon is called the kategoroumenon; it is, one
might say, what the hypokimenon has been accused of. The
corresponding English words, which derive from the
Latin, are "subject" and "predicate." Whenever a predicate
is attributed to a subject, then we have a statement, an
assertion, which expresses a decision regarding the validity of the attribution, or, the justness of the "accusation'~
for example, when "this" is "accused" of being a man in
the statement, This is a man.
Doubts about the universality of the subject-predicate
analysis of assertions have sometimes been raised. Consider for instance, the statement "It is raining?' It might
be suggested, in Aristophantic vein, that the pronoun ('it"
stands for Zeus. But this is surely not what we mean when
we say it is raining. Where is the logical subject- or is
there one?
I think this is a case in which we are fairly clear as
to what we mean or intend, while the structure of the
language fails to reflect the structure of the meaning. I
do not believe it is possible to find an assertion so simple as not to involve at least two mental signs. One is an
index, a sign which so to speak points to something; the
other will be a sign signifying a characteristic or situation or action which somehow belongs or pertains to that
which is pointed to. The assertion as a whole asserts
something of something, and therefore necessarily involves a two-foldness. Language may fail to mirror this
twofoldness. In the present case, I should say, we have
a kind of idea of a rainy day. The indexical or pointed
sign is that whereby I distinguish this day or time, as it
is placed in my experience. The assertion "It is raining"
as~e~ts th~t the present time is characterized by
rmn1ng-gmng-on.
There is another objection to the usual subjectpredicate analysis. When I say ''Alcibiades is taller than
Socrates;' it may be argued that I am talking about two
subjects, Alcibiades and Socrates. When I say, ''A sells
B to C for the price of D;' there are four indexical signs
A, B, C, and D, which are here connected by the relational predicate: ". . . sells . . . to . . . for the
price . . :• The logician may claim that there are four
logical subjects here, four hypokimena. The objection does
not deny the distinction between subject and predicate,
but points to cases in which there is not a single axis running from subject to predicate, but rather a relation which
relates two or more different things.
Let me pass this objection by for the moment.
Because of its greater simplicity, the assertion in which
a predicate is attributed to a single subject would appear
SPRING 1984
�to require consideration before relations are considered.
I shall return to relations later on.
An assertion, I said, expresses a 1 decision regarding
the validity of the attribution of predicate to subject, the
justness of the accusation. It presents itself as knowledge;
it pretends, so to speak, to be the truth. It may, of course,
turn out to be false. For instance, I may have pointed
at something and said, "That is a man;' and then it may
have turned out to be a showcase mannikin. Or the statement may become and remain doubtful or problematic.
Nevertheless, I should say that it belongs to the very
meaning of any assertion to make the claim to being
knowledge. Negation, doubtfulness, probability, or improbability are meaningful only as modifications of this
original claim. Even the statements which are used in
presenting to us a world of fantasy, say the fantasy-world
of a novel or of the Iliad, make this claim within the context of the unity of the particular fantasy-world. The
truthfulness of such a work of fantasy or imagination as
a whole is a rather more difficult matter, and lies in the
ways in which the fantasy-world imitates, either directly
or by analogy, certain features of the world in which we
live.
How do we determine whether an assertion is true?
Certainly we do this, day in and day out; but how? What
we encounter, in asking this question, is the problem of
evidence. What is an evident judgment?
The word "evidence" derives from the Latin word
evidens, meaning visible. The word "evidence" when used
in connection with judgments does not always mean
visibility, but visibility appears to be its most primitive
mean1ng.
think I should digress for a moment to point out
that most of the terms which we use in talking
about thinking depend on visual images. We speak,
for instance, of "definition;' which means setting bounds
or limits; of "synthesis" or "composition;' which means putting together; of"analysis;' which means breaking up; of"implication;" which means folding back upon. All these terms
exploit, more or less evidently, an analogy between thinking and certain motor activities which we can perform,
which we apprehend visually, and which in turn affect
or change what we see.
The assertion itself is something which is apprehended, not visually, but by means of hearing; although,
especially in a post-Gutenburg era, we may tend to think
of assertions as written out, visually. Now there appears
to be a fundamental difference between what is perceived
by hearing, and what is perceived by sight. What is
perceived by hearing is something that comes to be successively, in time. What is perceived by sight can present
itself as being there all at once, as a whole. A tone or
noise or statement comes to be successively, so that its
different parts exist in different times; it is a temporal
event. When I see a table, on the contrary, I take all of
its parts to exist simultaneously, even although what I
see at any one time is only one or two sides of the table.
I
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
I never see all parts and sides of the table at once, I can
only ·come to see all the parts in the sense that, by moving about, I am able to examine them one by" one in succession. But the table is not a temporal event.
This is an important difference, which may have important consequences; but the point for the moment is
this: A statement or assertion, coming to be in time,
makes a prima facie claim to knowledge. Knowledge of
what? We have to say, I think: knowledge of what is, and
of how it is. The judgment has a subject or hypokeimenon,
about which it is. This hypokeimenon must somehow be
pre-given, evidently given, prior to any asserting, if the
assertion is to be what it claims to be, namely knowledge
of what is. But what is evillently given? Many things,
perhaps, but first and foremost, what we can all agree
upon, the individual, visible objects which are presented
to us in the world. The object or thing presents itself to
us as being there, as a whole, with all its parts, within the
visible world. A temporal event, say a sound or a motion, seems, on the contrary, to demand further analysis:
we want to know what is moving, or what is the source
of the sound or other temporal event. The world as it
presents itself to us is first and foremost a world of individual objects.
T
herefore, I am going to start the discussion of
the problem of evidence by discussing the kind of
given-ness which a visible object has. Then I shall
go on to discuss other kinds of objects of awareness, which
can also be made subjects of predicative judgments, and
which may have their own modes of being evidently
given. These other objectivities, potential subjects of
judgments, are in a certain way founded upon our experience of the visible world; they arise for us in connection with our experience, but as Kant would put it,
they do not simply arise from experience- I think that
will be apparent.
How, then, are the individual objects of experience
given or presented to us? As I stated previously, I am
leaving out of account all that the physical and biological
sciences ran tell me of the processes involved in sensation and of the objects of experience. I wish to make,
in addition, certain further simplifications.
In sense experience I am confronted with individual
objects which present themselves as bodies, as corporeal.
But there are many individual objects of experience which
do not present themselves simply as corporeal. Animals,
men, and man-made objects, products of art, are indeed
perceived as bodies within the spatio-temporal world, but
they differ from rocky crags, rivers, and lakes, in expressing the presence or activity of what I shall call "soul." An
ash-tray is not simply a natural body; what it is can only
be understood by a reference to human beings who indulge in a certain vice. A human being is not perceived
as such in quite the same way as a rock is perceived as
a rock; there is involved an interpretation of what is perceived, as expressing the presence of soul, the psychic, the
subjective, the "I" or self of this other who is before me.
19
�The soul of the other is not simply perceptible in the manner of a corporeal object; but it is understood, through
more or less familiar types, with more or less familiar
interpretation of the simple perceptions, as being in and
the flrst time, I already know, in a sense, something about
kinds of characteristics. When I examine an object for
with what is simply perceptible. No.y this whole stratum
it. Not only do I perceive the side which is presented to
of experience, involving as it does the interpretation of
me, but I anticipate, in an indeterminate way, certain
what is bodily as expressing the psychic, I wish to leave
out of account, so as to attend entirely to what all such
experience presupposes, the experience of individual ob-
of the curtain here I imagine at this moment as being
jects as corporeal.
Finally, as a further simplification, you must permit
me to imagine that I am a purely contemplative being,
examining the individual objects out of a pure interest
in finding out about them. It is probably a rather rare
of the characteristics of the unseen side. The other side
grey; it is quite possible that it will turn out to be of
another color, but I am confident that it will have some
color. At the very least, the object is pre-given as a spatial
object, with such necessarz'ly accompanying characteristics
as color and shape; probably also as a spatial object of
a more particular type, belonging to a more specific
occurrence for such a pure interest to govern our activ-
category. The progress of the inquiry takes the form of
ity. Ordinarily we pass over the perceptions to go on to
manipulating objects, or valuing them in relation to cer-
correcting anticipations, or replacing vague anticipations
by definite, perceived characteristics. Every advance of
the inquiry has the form "Yes, it is as I expected;' or "Not
so, but otherwise"; in the latter case, the correction is
always a correction within a range of possibilities which
is not limitless. For instance, I may expect "red"; it will
tain practical aims. The "I" or self, living concretely in
its surroundings, and among other selves or persons, is
by no means primarily comtemplative. A pure comtemplation of a particular object can occasionally occur;
this involves a stopping of normal activity; it need not
be especially important. As subordinate to a philosophic
reflection which seeks to discover the structure of the
world, such contemplation can become serious. My sup-
position here of a purely contemplative interest may be
regarded as a fiction, designed to enable me to uncover
a basic stratum of experience.
The object does not present itself to me in isolation,
all by itself, nor does it present itself as something completely novel. With the awakening of my interest, it comes
forth from a background, in which I take it to have been
existing already, along with other objects. Suppose, for
instance, that the object which I am about to examine
is this lectern; I grasp it as something already existing,
something which was already there, in the auditorium,
even before I was looking at it. Similarly the auditorium,
with its stage and curtain and rows of seats, including
the part I do not see because it does not come within
my field of vision, was already there, was within the
bounds of the familiar St. John's campus, within the
familiar town of Annapolis, within the farther and less
not turn out to be Middle C. To each single perception
of the object there thus adheres a transcendence of perception, because of the anticipation of the possibility offurther determinations. In the succession of perceptions of
the object, I am aware of it as an identical something
which presents itself in and through its characteristics
and relations, but I am also aware of it as a unity of possible
experience, a substratum about which I can always acquire further information.
A
s I turn to the object for the first time, there is
a moment in which my attention is directed
to the object as a whole, before I go on to note
particular characteristics, parts not quite perceived of the
obvious whole. This moment has short duration; the attempt to make it last turns into a blank stare. But even
as I go on to examine particular aspects of the whole,
there remains an effect, a precipitate, so to speak, of this
first mental grasping of the object, this taking-it-in-asa-whole. As long as the object remains the theme of my
inquiry, the characteristics and aspects are not viewed
familiar reaches of Anne Arundel County, and so on,
separately, by themselves, but always as aspects of the ob-
till I say: within the world. This pre-given-ness of objects and of the world in which they are is prior to every
inquiry which seeks knowledge; it is presupposed in inquiry. The presupposition is a passively held belief, a
belief which I hold with unshakable certainty. It is doxa,
ject. If S is the object, and p, q, and r are characteristics,
the Greeks would say. There is a passive doxic certainty
in the being ofthe world and its objects; I cannot imagine it possible earnestly to doubt this belief. Every inquiry into an object proceeds on the basis of the believedin-world. Belief precedes inquiry which in turn aims at
knowledge.
The object itself is never completely novel, it never
presents itself as something completely indeterminate,
about which I can then proceed to learn. The world, for
us, is always a world in which inquiry has already gone
on; it is a familiar world the objects of which belong to
20
then my perceptions of p, q, and r are not isolated, but
each perception of a characteristic adds to, enriches the
meaning for me, of the substrate S; first S is seen to be
p, then S which is p is seen to be q, and so on. And always
in the background there is the sense of the object S as
a temporally enduring something which has these
characteristics. The persistence of S as an identity in time
presents itself passively, in the harmonius succession of
perceptions, as though I had nothing to do with it. Yet
I must note at least in passing that this grasp of the object as an enduring thing is complex, and presupposes
a structure in my inner time, in the flux of changing
awareness, whereby the object presented at any moment
is grasped as having been and as yet to be.
What I am seeking to describe here is a receptive ex-
SPRING 1984
�perience of the object in which I am first aware of the
object and then examine it, noting characteristics, without
actually making judgments or assertions; passing from
perception to perception, without attympting to fix once
for all the results of perception in the form of assertions.
But it is apparent that even in this receptive experience
of one particular object, prior to all judging, there
emerges the basis of the distinction between subject and
predicate, namely, in the distinction between substrate
and characteristic.
I can of course make anything which presents itself
into the theme of an examination or inquiry- the color
of the curtain, for instance, or the aggregate of seats in
the auditorium, which presents itself in a particular spatial
configuration. That with which the inquiry is concerned
as its theme then comes to be a substratum or substrate,
of which I proceed to ascertain the characteristics. The
distinction between substrate and characteristic would
thus seem to be relative to the theme of the inquiry. Some
of the things I perceive and attend to, however, are of
such a kind as to exist only as determinations or
characteristics of something else- for instance the color
here which I take as the color of the curtain. Other things
I perceive and attend to are not essentially dependent
in this way. The curtain, for instance, is not a
characteristic of the auditorium in the same sense as its
color is its characteristic. That the curtain is where it is
is in a sense accidental; it could be somewhere else, and
if it were, its color would have gone with it. In grasping
the curtain as an object of perception, I grasp something
which has a certain independence of everything else,
which does not present itself always and necessarily as
an aspect or characteristic of anything else.
I have been using the word "characteristic" in a vague
sense; and some further distinctions will be in order.
n individual object of perception, a body,
has parts, into which it could be divided by
some process; one part could be severed from
another. Such parts are to be distinguished from
characteristics which qualify the thing as a whole, for
instance the color of the whole, if it is of a sing1e color;
its shape or form; its extendedness; its roughness or
smoothness. Characteristics of the latter kind may be
called immediate properties of the whole. The parts, too, may
have properties, which are not immediately properties
of the whole, but first and foremost properties of the parts:
their shape, color, and so on. Moreover, there are aspects
of the thing which are properties of properties; for in:
stance, the surface of the thing is not an immediate property of the whole, but is essentially the limit of its extendedness, and hence a property of its extendedness.
Some characteristics or determinations of a thing involve an essential reference to other things. The other
things may be actually nearby and therefore perceivable
along with the thing I am examining, or they may be
presented in memory or in the imagination. I have already said that we perceive an object as being of a more
A
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
or less determinate type- it is a kind of tree, or rock,
and so on. The recognition of type depends upon a precipitate of past experience. I do not necessarily remember
particular objects which were previously experienced and
which are similar to the one before me; I do not make
an explicit comparison; but past experience, now apparently forgotten, has somehow produced a precipitate
of habitual familiarity which operates without my being
explicitly aware of it as such.
But comparisons of objects with respect to likeness
or similarity can also become explicit. The comparison
then involves a mental going-back-and-forth between one
of the objects and the other, with at the same time a
holding-in-grasp ofthe one I am not at the moment attending to. The object with which I am comparing the
one in front of me may be present or else absent; in the
latter case it is either remembered or imagined. The
similarity may amount to complete alike-ness or
sameness, or it may have to do with the whole of each
object but still involve difference,' as the large bright-red
ball is similar to but not completely like the small darkred ball. Or again, the similarity may relate only to particular aspects of the objects, as the table and chair may
be alike with respect to color or ornamentation.
The relations I have mentioned thus far- relations
of similarity and difference- are to be distinguished from
relations which presuppose that the things related are
actually present and co-existing, and not given in imagination or memory. For instance, the distance of one
object from another is a relation which requires both objects to be given as present. Again, in order that an object be perceived as part of a configuration of objects,
say a constellation of stars, it is necessary that all objects of the configuration be present in a perceptually
grasped whole. Such relations I think I shall call reality
relations, because they require the real, simultaneous
presence of the objects related.
All relations, whether comparison-relations or realityrelations, presuppose that the objects related are taken
together as a plurality. The awareness of the objects as
forming a plurality is, however, only a precondition for the
grasping of a relation. In order for me to grasp a relation, there must be a primary interest in one of the objects, in relation to which the other objects are seen as
similar, or nearby, and so on. I see A as taller than B;
the focus of interest is for the moment on A, which thus
forms the substrate of the relation. The interest, of course,
can shift to B, in which case I see B as shorter than Ain a sense the same relation. All relational facts are thus
reversible. The general fact that in relating objects I go
from one to the other would be my reason for regarding
the simple subject-predicate analysis of assertions as
fundamental.
The grasping of a relation presupposes that the
plurality of objects related is given; but the given-ness
of the plurality can be of different kinds. In a comparisonrelation one or more of the objects compared may be
an imagined or fictive object rather than a perceived ob-
21
�ordered in succession.] ust how such a form comes about
and there works to build my general familiarity with the
perceivable world. But it is not yet knowledge. We have
some way yet to go before we reach anything which can
be called, in a strict sense, knowledge.
The predicative judgment presupposes an active will
to knowledge. I return to the substrate S, and now grasp
actively and explicitly the fact that it is determined by the
characteristic p. The transition from S to p no longer
occurs passively, but is guided by an active will to hold
S fast by fixing its characteristics. The substrate becomes
the subject of a predication. Fixing the gaze on the hidden unity of S and p, I now grasp actively the synthesis
is a difficult problem. But the point I am making here
is that this objective time, which is presupposed in reality-
of the two which was previously given only in a passive
way. I say: "S is p"; or, "The curtain is beige" (if that is
relations, binds together my own experience and the experience of others, so that it is experience of one world.
the right name for this color).
Having uttered or thought a judgment, my fictional
contemplative fellow has for the first time used words. Now
what does this involve? Let me first distinguish two kinds
ject; and in this case the togetherness of the objects is
brought about only in my own
a~areness,
in my own
inner time, but not in the visible world. The objects
related in a reality-relation, on the other hand, stand next
to one another in a real duration,
ill
an objective time
valid for all objects of the visible world. This objective
time is also valid for other persons besides myself. If someone tells me of his past experience, what he remembers
has its fixed place in the same public time as does my
own past experience. Objective or public time is a form
in accordance with which everything perceivable is
All the distinctions I have been making- between
substrate and characteristic, immediate property and
mediate property, part and whole, comparison-relation
and reality-relation -are, I am claiming, recognizable
as involved in our experience of the visible world, the
world of broad daylight, independently of the forms of
our speech. The forms of speech, I am claiming, are rooted
in these distinctions. In our actual lives, the receptive
experiencing of the perceivable world, on the one hand,
and our speaking, our predicative judging, on the other,
are not separate but interlaced. I have separated them
in analysis because they are separable, and because in
separating them I find it possible to discern the ways in
of words in the sentence "The curtain is beige:' First,
words like "curtain" and ''beige," which could by themselves
. constitute assertions in certain contexts, for instance as
answers to questions. These have been traditionally
known as categorematic terms. Secondly, there are words
which influence within an assertion the way in which the
categorematic terms signify what they signify; these have
been traditionally known as syncategorematic terms. For in~
stance, the word "the" before "curtain" is a demonstrative
which makes the word "curtain" refer to this curtain; the
copula "is" a sign indicating the synthesis of subject and
which objects present themselves in experience. It is a
predicate in judgment. But it is the categorematic term
very simple and obvious thing I am saying. Speech, logos,
presupposes a world, the world, in which it is a fundamental fact that there are distinguishable, relatively
independent objects which present themselves in and
through their characteristics. The world, on the contrary,
does not presuppose speech or language.
"curtain" which tells me what I am talking about, and
the categorematic term ''beige" which tells me what I am
saying about it. These words are common nouns and adjectives; verbs are also categorematic. The meanings of
such terms are what we call universals because the words
in virtue of their meanings are able to refer to many particular instances. All predication involves such univer-
In calling our experience of the world "receptive;' I
do not mean to imply that the "I" or self is altogether
sals. This fact points back to the fact that every perceived
passive in such experience. Every awareness is an
awareness of something; there is a polarity here, with the
"I" or self at one pole and the object of awareness at the
object or characteristic in the perceivable world is per-
other. The "I" is affected by the object; it attends to or
grasps it. Activity and passivity are interlaced in each
awareness.
ceived as of a more or less known or familiar type. The
common nouns and adjectives used in predication refer
to such types. When I say, "This object is beige;' there
is implicit in this predication a relation to the general
essence beige. The relation to the general essence or
universal is not yet explicit here, as it would begin to be
I
f we turn now to the predicative judgment, we
encounter a new kind of interest and activity on
the part of the "I" or self. Let us suppose that I have
perceived a certain object or substrate S, and then noted
a characteristic of it, p. For instance, I may have isolated
the curtain as an object and then noted its color. These
activities- the grasping of the substrate, the holding of
the substrate in grasp while I note the color, which is
thus grasped as belonging to the substrate- these activities
are bound to what is immediately given. The result of
such activities, if I do not fix it once for all in a predicative
judgment, is not really my possession. Perhaps it is not
altogether lost, but sinks into the background of awareness
22
if I said, "This is a beige object;' where the indefinite article a points to generality. Later on I shall try to discuss
the problem of the given-ness of universals. But in assertions about individual objects of the perceivable world,
the explicit grasping of universals is not involved; the use
of common nouns and adjectives is based on our passive,
doxic familiarity with types of things and characteristics.
Assertions about individual perceivable objects run
parallel to our receptive experience of such objects. I have
already mentioned judgments of the type "S is p;' "The
curtain is beige:' Such judgments express the fact that
a substrate is characterized by the immediate property p.
If the focus of interest passes to a second immediate prop-
SPRING 1984
�erty q, we get an assertion of the form, "S which is p
is also q"; or the subordinate clause "which is p" may be
replaced simply by the attributive adjective p modifying S. To take another case: if the property p of S is itself
characterized by a property a, we get an assertion of the
form, "S is p which is a"; and again the subordinate clause
"which is a" may be replaced by an adverb modifying
p. The use of adverbs and attributive adjectives thus
presupposes prior assertions.
There are assertions of the form "S has T;' which express the fact that an individual object S contains a certain part; for example, "The house has or contains an
attic." Assertions of this kind refer back to experiences
in which an object is perceived as being a whole made
up of parts. These assertions cannot be converted into
assertions of the form "Sis p''; the part which is separable
cannot lose its independence and become a property. On
the other hand, a statement of the form "S is p" can be
turned into a statement of the form ''S has T"; for instance, the assertion "This object is red" can become "This
object has redness;' or reversely, "Redness belongs to this
object:' This shift involves a substantijying of the property
designated by the word "red." Substantivity means standing as something which can have characteristics, and
which can therefore become the subject of a predication;
it is opposed to adJectivity, which means being in or on
something else. Substantivity and adjectivity are not
merely a matter of grammatical forms; the difference in
the two depends on a difference in the manner of grasping something, either as for itself, or as on or in something.
Any characteristic of a thing, although initially presented
as in or on a substrate, can be substantified. This freedom
in substantifying rests on the fact that already in the
receptive experience of the world everything that presents
itself, whether substrate or characteristic, can be made
the theme of inquiry; it has characteristics which can be
ascertained, including relations of sirriilarity and difference to other substrates or characteristics.
Again, there are assertions based on our grasping of
relations in experience, for instance the assertion '1\. is
similar to B." Once more we have a subject and a
predicate, but the predicate is more complicated than in
the previous cases. The word "similar" is adjectival, but
its adjectivity is different from that of the word ''red";
it is grasped only through the transition in awareness
fi·om A to B, from the subJect to the obJect of the relation.
Once again, what is adjectival can be substantified, and
we can come to speak of the "similarity of A to B:'
N
ow this freedom in substantifying extends
further, and at this point we can take a very
large step forward. Having uttered assertions,
I can now substantify that which they mean, the synthesis of subject and predicate which is intended in the
act of asserting. I can make statements of the form, "The
fact that S is p, is q;' where q can be an adjective like
"just" or "pleasant." Here the subject of the sentence is
itself a sentence expressing a state of affairs. As subject
ST. .JOHN'S REVIEW
of the new sentence, the assertion "S is p" is no longer
traversed in a two-membered, upbeat-downbeat rhythm;
it is caught, so to speak, in one beam of the attention,
is treated as a substrate of which I can ascertain
characteristics. We here encounter a new kind of object
of awareness, the unity of meaning in a completed judgment. Such objects I shall call obJects of reason, because
they presuppose the activity of reason or logos, the faculty of making judgments.
These new objects, constituted in the activity of
reason, differ radically from the objects presented in our
experience of the perceptual world. The perceptual object is indeed presented in a temporal process; further
examination always enriches its meaning, adds to its
ascertained characteristics. But the object is always there;
the examination of the object can be broken off at any
point, and yet the object is always presented as being one
and the same and there. The activity of the "I" or self produces presentations of the object, but not the object itself.
In the case of an object of reason, on the other hand,
the synthesis of subject and predicate is required for the
object to be given at all; the activity of the "I" cannot
be broken off at an arbitrary point, but must be carried
through to completion, in order for the object to be
present.
The difference may be stated differently. The perceptual object, the individual object of the visible world, is
presented in the course of my inner time, the succession
of awareness, but it always stands before me as existing
in an objective time, a time which is valid for the whole
world of individual objects. It is an individual thing,
distinguished from every other individual thing of the
visible world in virtue of being localized in public space
and time. An object of reason, the unity of meaning in
an assertion, does not belong to the visible world in this
way; we do not find meanings in the world in the same
way in which we find things. The meant states of affairs
are indeed constituted and grasped in my inner time.
But what is grasped when I grasp the content of an assertion is not given as itself belonging to any particular
stretch of the objective time of the world. I am not concerned here with the truth or falsity of the assertion, but
only with the mode of given-ness of its content. That
Caesar crossed the Rubicon may be true or false; but
the kind of object I grasp when I grasp the content of
this assertion, namely a meaning, presents itself as transtemporal, something which is identically the same every
time I grasp it, that is, every time I think of it, but which
is not itself individualized in the space and time of the
visible world.
What I am saying here is, I believe, quite elementary, and is tacitly presupposed in every assertion I make.
For in making an assertion I intend that the auditor grasp
my meaning, and I am disappointed when what he says
and does implies that he has failed to understand. Any
particular uttering of the assertion is an event in the objective time of the world; but I act as if what is asserted
in many repetitions of the assertion is self-identical,
23
�always the same, and capable as such of being communicated.
Now there is one more kind ot object whose mode
of given-ness has to be discussed; tpis is the universal,
the idea, or in the Greek, eidos. The Greek word eidos
comes from the verb "to see;' and meant originally the
"look" of a thing. The look of a thing, what we see on
first impression, is the general type to which the thing
belongs. In the sense of familiar type, the universal has
been with us all along.
Up to now I have been talking about experience of
individual objects ofthe visible world, and about assertions immediately based on such experience. All such
assertions involve an implicit relation to generalities or
universals; this is shown by the fact that in making an
assertion we have to use common nouns and adjectives and
verbs, which in virtue of their meaning are capable of
referring to many individuals. Words of this kind, capable
of referring to many instances, seem to be fundamental
to any language. Even proper names often derive from
common nouns, Smith,. Brown, Klein, and so on. The
implicit relation to universals rests on our typical familiarity with the world, the fact that every object presents
itself as belonging to a more or less definite type.
Is there any way in which ideas or universals can be
explicitly grasped, as evidently given objects of consciousness? This is a difficult question. Let me point out
first that every inquiry aiming at knowledge seems to
presuppose that the universal can be clearly and distinctly
grasped, insofar as it assumes that questions of the form,
What is so-and-so, for instance, What is what we call a
tree, or a meson, or courage, can be inquired into, and
with effort and good luck, be answered. In Greek, the
question is -ri Eanv- What is it? The what is the universal, capable by its nature of being applied to many.
You must permit me once more to proceed on the
basis of the simplest example. Suppose I am confronted
with two objects, S and S', each of which has the property p, say "red." Of course S has its redness, and S' has
its redness; there is a separateness of the properties as
well as of the substrata. But there is also a unity here,
an identity, which I can grasp in shifting the attention
from S to S' and back again. There is a oneness in the
manyness. The comparison of objects, the focusing upon
that with respect to which they are similar, can go on
to further cases, and need not be limited to actually
presented cases, but may include the consideration of
imagined, possible cases. Thus through the medium of the
imagination I arrive at the notion of an infinity, an endlessness of possible individuations of the same eidos. It
may be difficult to define the limits of the possible variation of instances, but in some cases I do seem to be able
to do this, and to see that the universal involves definite
limits, a definite structure, definite relations to other
universals. For instance, I can imagine the colors of the
objects to be different; there is a range of possible colors, but I seem to grasp that whatever color is, it will
always be extended; an unextended color is unimagin-
24
able. Similarly, it appears clear to me that a tone or any
sound must in every instance have an intensity, as well
as the quality we call timbre or tone-quality.
I introduce these cases of intellectual perception, not
because of any importance they might or might not have
in themselves, but because of what they show. It is not
enough, and not quite correct, to say that they derive from
experience, that they are inductions or abstractions from
experience. If I observe 100 swans, and find them all to
be white, I may indeed guess that all swans are white;
but the conclusion is not necessary, and is in fact false,
since there are black swans in Central Africa. It is not
the same with the connection between color and extension; color involves extension essential(y, and I see this not
just by observing particular instances of color, but by a
variation of instances in the imagination, which allows
me to "see" what must be involved in any case of color.
And the idea or eidos, which thus appears as an identity
running through the imaginable instances, presents itself,
like the objects of reason previously described, as
something trans-temporal, something not in the objective world with its objective time, not even immanent in
the acts of consciousness, but as an identity which can
be repeatedly intended by consciousness.
Permit me to summarize what I have been saying.
I have been aiming, not to make hypotheses, but to describe and to explicate; what I have been attempting to
describe and explicate is that which is involved or presupposed in the making of assertions, judgments, predications. The description has proceeded by stages; at each
stage I seek to delineate precisely what the I or self grasps,
as being somehow presented to it.
The making of predications presupposes, in the first
place, my pre-predicative, pre-reflective experience of the
world. My pre-predicative experience of the world can
be separated, in analysis, from speech; our speaking, on
the contrary, appears when analyzed always to point back
to the pre-predicative experience of the world. Prepredicative experience is first and foremost experience
of perceivable objects. The objects present themselves as
in the world, along with other objects, in an objective
time which is valid for all such objects. They present
themselves as belonging to more or less familiar types.
And they present themselves in and through their properties, parts, and relations. There is always a sense of
"and so on" attaching to my experience of a perceivable
object, in that I can always make further determinations,
both of the internal characteristics of the object and of
its relations to other objects. But it remains throughout
an identity, a locus of possible experience, a substratum
of possible determinations.
Predication, on the simplest level, involves an active
repetition of the passage in pre-predicative experience
from substratum to characteristic. The flow of perceptions in our pre-predicative experience goes on harmoniously almost of itself. Predication, on the other hand,
presupposes an active will to fix, once and for all, that
which is given in experience, to make it my possession.
SPRING 1984
�The predication is embodied in a temporal event, in a
succession of sounds, the spoken sentence; but it is not
itself this temporal event. The sound erherges from silence
and falls back into silence; it passes li~e an arrow, leaving no trace in the air. But that which the sound
expresses, the predication, is a unity or identity of meaning which can be repeatedly intended and repeatedly expressed; speaking quite strictly, it is not in the objective
time of the world, but is grasped as trans-temporal. It
is constituted in the activity of the I or self, but it is nonetheless an objectivity; it can be substantified, and itself
made the subject of predication.
Finally, I have described one further and essential
condition of predicative speech, namely the universal.
Every assertion I make involves categorematic terms,
universals, which in their nature are capable of referring
to many instances. The use of the universal in speech
is based, to begin with, on the typical character of my
experience of the world, the fact that objects and
characteristics present themselves as belonging to more
or less familiar types. The universal first enters the assertion so to speak tacitly, without its range of meaning being explicitly grasped. But the will to knowledge can be
satisfied only if the universal can itself be made the subject of predication. The empirical sciences approach such
universal predications by means of statistical inference;
their results are always open-ended, subject to revision.
But it also appears that there is such a thing as intellectual perception, eidetic insight, by which one can grasp
the range of a universal, define it, and make necessary
predications about it, on the basis of a variation of instances in the imagination. I may note that, on a rough
count, nearly half the assertions I have made this evening are such universal assertions.
My effort at description has to end here, although
the stopping-point is arbitrary; there is a vast range of
possible explications of this kind, which would have the
aim of delineating each objectivity or kind of objectivity
presented to awareness just as it presents itself. I regard
such description as important, because I believe the correct method of philosophy is that of attending to and
grasping states of affairs just as they are given or presented, and explicating them with respect to such of their
connections and relations as are likewise presented and
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
grasped. Only by a repetition of this process can philosphically primitive ideas and propositions receive adequate
confirmation. Principles should not be just postulated
or constructed, accepted merely on faith, whether animal
or spiritual, or justified by the emotional comfort or practical success they may bring. That is part of the meaning, I think of the Socratic return to the logoi.
W
hat, finally, about the Underground, since the
announced title of this lecture included that
term? The German word "Underground" can
mean anything which either in a direct way or analogically underlies something else. So in talking about
hypokimena, or subjects of predication, and of the way
in which they present themselves, I can claim to have
been talking about the underground of speech. But as
everyone knows, there is a more subversive and indeed
altogether more interesting sort of underground, the one
which, Dostoevski intends in Notes from the Underground.
This underground is the location, so to speak, of certain writers of the present and of the last hundred years
who throw to us, and in fact to the whole tradition of
philosophy, a certain challenge. There are really many
challenges which they throw; the challenges are difficult
to characterize as a whole, but they might perhaps be
subsumed under the formula of the old myth of Prometheus, according to which all the gifts which make man
man, including speech, are based upon, and therefore infected by a fraud. So Camus and Jaspers and Heidegger speak of man as a castaway, shipwrecked on an island
of everyday-ness. And Heidegger above all has sought
to pull the tradition of philosophy up by the roots, and
to show that our awareness of the world and of ideas as
constituted in inner time involves a fraud. Then wisdom
can only lie in the destruction, the total dismantling, of
what is fraudulent in our awareness. And perhaps the
four revolver shots of Meersault, the hero of Camus' novel
The Stranger, are more efficacious in this respect than the
discipline of listening to and following the logos. On the
other hand, it might just be that the staccato notes which
issue from the Underground will shock us, and cause
us to look once more with open eyes and with wonder
at what is our most characteristically human endowment,
speech.
25
�Orwell's Future and the Past
Ronald Berman
C
zeslaw Milosz wrote in The Captive Mind that
Orwell was phenomenally popular behind
the Iron Curtain because readers were
"amazed that a writer who never lived in
Russia should have so keen a perception into
its life:' 1 But truth is not always the appropriate standard by which to judge fiction. Orwell may have given
us a convincing picture of life in the Soviet Union, and
of the social character of totalitarianism, but that is not
all he has done. He had more than Moscow or even London in mind when writing about the chief City of Airstrip
One, a province of Oceania: it may well be that Nineteen
Eighty-Four is as much about Athens as it is about
Moscow. A place in any work of fiction, like Pemberley
or Laputa or Vanity Fair, is primarily an idea.
Nineteen Eighty-Four differs radically from most stories
of the future. It is not about a great calamity which comes
from outside the social situation. It is resolutely conventional in its description of things and its understanding
of character. There can be very few other works about
the future life of man so permeated by the smell of boiled
cabbage. A producer has despairingly remarked of
science-fiction films that they have been all platinum hair
and diagonal zippers, but there is none of that here; no
fascination with the terrors of change. In many ways,
Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to resist futurism.
Rather it seems to require a lot of knowledge about
history. It challenges our recollection of Lenin, Stalin,
and Trotsky. It suggests events of the twentieth century
as we have experienced them. But the book is also about
certain philosophical arguments. Orwell intends us to
Ronald Berman served as chairman of the National Endowment for
the Humanities from 1971-1977. He is now director of the Humanities
Institute at the University of California, San Diego.
26
recall many of them, beginning with that between Socrates and Thrasymachus. O'Brien is the ultimate version of those Guardians "who keep watch over our commonwealth"' and preserve the purity of its laws. It makes
a good deal of sense to read Nineteen Eighty-Four in the
light of Plato's Republic- and of the Politics of Aristotle.
I think that the book also intends us to recall certain
literary themes. It is a superb example of the topos of
awakening into intellectual and spiritual life. Winston
Smith shares the awakening experience -"It is not easy
to become sane':_ not only with the wretched prisoners
of the Ministry of Love but with all those whose awakening challenges their capacity to understand it, with Lear,
with Kurtz, with Gregor Samsa. I would not call it a
genre, but one of the great literary forms of the West
is about a man who escapes from the Shadows of the
Cave, and is blinded by what he sees.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a very literary book, full of echoes
of other books. It develops ideas which have been argued
for centuries. In a seilse, the sources of this book are
everywhere. To go through Orwell's Collected Essays, journalism and Letters is to be overwhelmed by the names of
authors and the titles of books. His work is a library of
allusions to Arnold, Baudelaire, Belloc, Carlyle, Dickens,
Eliot, Flaubert, Gissing, Hardy, Lawrence, Powell,
Shakespeare, Waugh, and others the full mention of
whom would take a very long time. He read everything,
and he quarrelled with most of it.
We know that Orwell read the classics because he
complained in such detail about having to read them.
When he was at St. Cyprian's (immortalized in "Such,
Such Were the Joys") he was force-fed the classics like
a Strasbourg goose. In order for the school to make a
reputation off the brilliance of its students the scholarship boys were bullied into brilliance. In order to distinguish themselves on the examinations they had to become
SPRING 1984
�little encyclopedias of Latin and Greek, ''crammed with
learning as cynically as a goos~1 is crammed for
Christmas:'' Orwell said of his involuntary mastery of
the classics, "looking back, I realize that I then worked
harder than I have ever done since:'4 it is a fairly strong
remark from the author of Down and Out in Paris and
London.
Orwell's favorite reading on summer mornings at
school, when he was temporarily free from his own set
of academic Guardians, included the novels of H. G.
Wells. It seems odd to think that Nineteen Eighty-Four
should be in part a combination of two such different
kinds of reading: stolen hours with Wells and soldiering
through Latin and Greek. I think we should agree that
Wells stayed with Orwell till the end of his life, and, I
would argue, so did the reading he did with much less
enjoyment.
The dialogue form is rightly associated with Plato,
but before looking at The Republic we ought to consider
the connection between Orwell and Aristotle's Politics. For
the latter, I believe, is the most essential book in that
history of ideas which Nineteen Eighty-Four summarizes,
and of which it is the latest statement. Aristotle's Politics
contains nearly everything but Orwell's plot. The fifth
book of the Politics, on the causes of revolution, describes
a society penetrated by informers, spies, eavesdroppers,
and secret police. It analyzes the conscious institution
of poverty by the state. It discusses the rivalry between
the state and other social units like the family. It refers
to the public promotion of private hatreds. It talks about
war as a form of domestic policy. Above all, it is about
the attack on what Aristotle calls the "spirit" of the polis.
There are many tactical similarities between the two
books. For example, Aristotle writes that "men are not
so likely to speak their minds if they go in fear of a secret
police;' 5 and we can see without difficulty how this observation can have been put into narrative form. (Although,
clearly, given the totalitarian history of our own century
we need not go to Aristotle for the suggestion). It is probably more important for us to be aware of more specific
resemblances. Aristotle, like Orwell, is not concerned with
tyranny as a sudden calamity but as a development of
other forms of political life. When he writes that "the
methods applied in extreme democracies are thus all to
be found in tyrannies" (245) he provides us with a way
of recognizing and interpreting events in Nineteen EightyFour.
Both the Politics and Nineteen Eighty-Four are about the
development of political systems. Both are about a certain
kind of tyranny, which goes far beyond merely political
rule. Both are about oligarchy: Emmanuel Goldstein's
book (actually written by O'Brien and his collaborators)
is called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,
a title which neatly connects classical and Communist
terminology. The phrase "oligarchy" itself leads us inescapably to its classic definition, which is in the works
of Plato and Aristotle where the conception of closed
minority rule enters our political consciousness.
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Aristotle describes a number of forms of oligarchy,
not all of which concern us. What we are concerned with
is, I suggest, the kind of oligarchy which has some connection both to tyranny and to what Aristotle disapprovingly calls "extreme democracies:' The ultimate form of
oligarchy comes about when a dynasty has absolute control over property, men, and politics, "and it is persons,
and not the law, who are now the sovereign" (172). The
reader of Nineteen Eighty-Four tends to slide by distinctions, but The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
recognizes the differences between stages of despotism.
It is very close to Aristotle when it acknowledges that
"the essence of oligarchical rule" is to be found in "the
persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of
life." That ((certain world-view" means the law has been
replaced by a different conception, that of power. In
Aristotle, oligarchy becomes tyranny; in Orwell it
becomes dictatorship.
There is a passage in Nineteen Eighty-Four often cited
for its quality of psychological revelation. The passage,
from O'Brien's apologia for the Party, states the satisfactions of power as the reason for exerting it:
We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we
know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German
Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in
their methods, but never had the couragee to recognize their
own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that
they had seized power unwillingly, and that just around the
corner there lay a paradise. ... We are not like that. We know
that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing
it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish
a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes
the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. (116)6
The modern audience is rightly fascinated by the insight
into aberrant motivation. Any teacher of Nineteen EightyFour finds that this passage gets students to realize some
hidden truths about human desires. But the passage is
useful to us in another way, because it makes a crucial
distinction: "all the oligarchies of the past" have had
political ends. And, they have culminated only in the
forms described by Aristotle and other theorists. This
oligarchy will be different in its philosophical imaginativeness. It will extend political definitions.
Orwell has a highly organized sense of the operation
of such an oligarchy. His narrative is deployed around
three issues:,
1. The relationship of the state to certain individuals
who represent potential opposition to authority.
2. The object, political and non-political, of unconstitutional power.
3. The tactics of authority.
These issues cover the common ground between Orwell
and his source. We ought to see how they take shape in
Aristotle, and how they are dramatized by Orwell.
27
�I Individual and State:
II The Object of Power:
Aristotle's. discussion of tyranny is first of all concerned with the relationship of individual to government.
He writes of the man who is virtuous or "outstanding"
in a rather special way. This man is the natural object
of tyranny. He need not be in active opposition to the
state. It suffices that the state recognizes the fact of his
excellence, that it perceives his excellence to be a potential threat. This conception is at the heart of Orwell's narrative. Winston Smith seems unheroic to us, who have
been raised on a literature of more activist heroes. But
it must be understood that he is more honest than the
other characters- except possibly for O'Brien -and that
he is capable of independent thought. And, he loves what
is beautiful. In his world, these constitute remarkable differences. If his character did not constitute a danger to
illicit power then the following dialogue would not have
been written:
Perhaps the most important thing that can be said
about this part of Aristotle's discussion is that. it is not
political, at least not as the phrase "political" is commonly
understood. Aristotle's discussion (244) is existential. He
knows what the "traditional" policies of tyranny are, but
he is much more concerned with policies directed {against
'~nd you consider yourself morally superioi to us, with our
lies and our cruelty?"
"Yes, I consider myself superior." (119)
He has been kicked and flogged and insulted before saying this, and he has rolled on the floor in his own blood.
I think that qualifies as "outstanding."
All outstanding men are potential criminals. Aristotle
was much interested in a certain story about such citizens
(he mentions it on three separate occasions in the Politics).
It is about the appropriate punishment for excellence.
By the time the story had reached him it had become
a parable of political foresight: of policy dealing with propensity. The story is about the "advice which was offered
by Periander to his fellow-tyrant Thrasybulus" about the
best way to deal with those potential enemies, the
"outstanding citizens" of the commonwealth (237). Aristotle refers to this story a number of times, but in an .
abbreviated way. Here I quote the fuller account given
in Herodotus:
On one occasion he sent a herald to ask Thrasybulus what
mode of government it was safest to set up in order to rule
with honour. Thrasybulus led the messenger without the city,
and took him into a field of corn, through which he began
to walk, while he asked him again and again concerning his
coming from Corinth, ever as he went breaking off and throwing away all such ears of corn as over-topped the rest. In this
way he went through the whole field, and destroyed the richest
and best part of the crop. 7
The bewildered messenger returns home, and it is left
to the subtle imagination of tyranny to interpret the
meaning. Herodotus has reversed the asking and giving
of advice, but he has clearly provided the essential
strategy for tyranny: cut off the tallest heads. The Politics
takes its departure for the study of tyranny from this story.
Orwell has translated the idea of outstanding civic
merit- Winston differs from the rest because of his inward honesty, his sensibility, and his intellectual
stubborness- but, as both O'Brien and he acknowledge,
he is indeed morally "superior."
28
everything lihdy to produce the two qualities of mutual confidence
and a high spirit" (emphasis added). The statement seems
oddly inexact, especially for a methodical thinker. It
seems far afield from politics. But is very close to Orwell's
conception of policy in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The statement is rephrased in various ways throughout Aristotle's discussion of tyranny, surfacing finally as
one of his major conclusions about the subject. One of
the great ends of the authoritarian state is, he states, to
break the "spirit" (246) of its citizens. The Politics is a book
rich in detail and in historical example- it lets us know
just what policies are used by Sparta or Athens or Corinth in just what circumstances. But it is also a book of
consummate psychological insight. Aristotle's discussion
of tyranny is much more than a catalogue of ruinous
taxes, unjust laws, and inhuman penalties. He writes
about the effect of tyranny in a way which must have
captured Orwell's eye. He writes about the destruction
of what is intuitive in human character and free in human
expression. He is concerned with friendship, confidence,
trust, feeling and, above all, with spirit. He refers again
and again to "spirit:' coming back to it each time as the
ultimate object of tyrannic power. He insists on the
human necessity for association, and his essay is largely
an analysis of the forms it takes, forms which are the
natural object of unjust power. Nineteen Eighty-Four is
about association in all its forms, from the sexual union
through the choice of friends to the formation of the family, the consent of the community, and the largest voluntary association of all, the polis itself. Each of its episodes
in some exemplary way concerns the breakdown of
human association.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a story of political resistance.
It is about the operation of sensibility. It does not describe
the activity of a political cell-Winston's ideas of rebellion
are never more than hopes or illusions. The narrative
is about sexual and aesthetic consciousness. It is about
a man with a sense of taste and style who perceives things
artistically. Its central symbolic object is a piece of coral
embedded in glass; its central act is the act of love.
May I suggest that O'Brien as well as Orwell has read
the Politics? To O'Brien, political theory ofthe past is an
explicit challenge. He mentions that theory constantly,
and always points out how its conception of totalitarianism has been exceeded by his own contribution to that
subject. He takes an unholy delight in posing as a teacher,
conducting a "dialogue" with the uninitiated, discussing
to what degree the future will exceed the moral limits
of the past. He gives us what Aristotle did not guess at:
the reason why tyranny is pleased by power. And he is,
I think, fully and perhaps exquisitely aware of the truism
SPRING 1984
�that is at the beginning of Aristotle's fifth Book: "Men
tend to become revolutionaries from circumstances connected with their private lives" (227), He must be aware
of this, for it is this idea which validates his unending
search for deviations of taste, style, ·.or feeling.
O'Brien competes with all political theory before him.
When he discusses oligarchy his version surpasses the
classical definition; and when he discusses tyranny his
version outdoes the pallid beginnings of injustice
previously recorded. He has the trait-almost the ticof comparing the future with tbe past, which is to say
of comparing his own megalomania to that of all tyrants
before him. What all previous books say about the effect of tyranny on private life will be exceeded after the
orgasm has been "abolished:' The entire philosophical
category of "private" life will also have been abolished.
III The Tactics of Authoritarian Power:
How does the authoritarian state respond to the
natural human desire for association? By defending itself,
Aristotle writes, from "everything likely to produce the
two qualities of mutual confidence and a high spirit:' The
unjust state will prohibit public meetings and make
"mutual acquaintance" difficult. This necessarily means
the invasion of privacy, and Aristotle tells us how that
is accomplished. In essence, men must live their private
lives in public. What they say and whom they talk to must
always be under scrutiny. Under tyranny, all citizens must
literally be under the eye of government.
Citizens must not confuse themselves by assuming
that there are independent and opposed public and private realms. Aristotle's locution for the destruction of privacy is, to say the least, striking and anticipatory. The
forced exhibition of private association,
is meant to give the ruler a peep-hole into the actions of his
subjects, and to inure them to humility by a habit of daily
slavery. (244)
By no stretch of the imagination was Aristotle thinking
of television. But Orwell, who was thinking of television,
may have joined an idea to its technological realization.
In general, Orwell allows O'Brien to show how previous political theory, disarmed by its own limits of imagination (and possibly by its own decency), has failed to
understand both the power of the state and the human
nature upon which it feeds. When we read the list of state
activities provided by Aristotle we sense that it provides
Orwell with a skeleton structure for his story, and provides O'Brien with a history that must be exceeded:
A fourth line of policy is that of endeavouring to get regular
information about every man's sayings and doings. This entails a secret police like the female spies employed at Syracuse,
or the eavesdroppers sent by the tyrant Hiero to all social
gatherings and public meetings. (Men are not so likely to speak
their minds if they go in fear of a secret police; and if they
do speak out, they are less likely to go undetected.) Still another
line of policy is to sow mutual distrust and to foster discord
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
between friend and friend; between people and notables; between one section of the rich and another. Finally, a policy pursued by tyrants is that of impoverishing their subjects .... The
imposition of taxes produces a similar result. ... The same
vein of policy also makes tyrants war-mongers, with the object of keeping their subjects constantly occupied and continually in need of a leader. (244-245)
One grants that these ideas have passed into universal
currency and, after two thousand years, are to be found
scattered from Machiavelli to Lenin. But the vein of
discourse in Nineteen Eighty-Four is pointedly historical.
O'Brien's favorite rhetorical mode is to invoke the incomplete tyrannies of the past from Egypt to the Inquisition to National Socialism whenever he wishes to establish
the ultimacy of the Party. Orwell's historical references
and phrases are more pointed than a casual reading may
bring out. For example, Aristotle states that one of the
best ways to waste civic resources intentionally is to
undertake useless public projects: "one example of this
policy is the building of the Egyptian pyramids: another
is tbe lavish offerings to temples" (245). The Theory and
Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism agrees that it is indispensable for tyranny to destroy private wealth by public
means, but it takes the idea literally. O'Brien-Goldstein
considers Aristotle's example ...!'it would be quite simple
to waste the surplus labor of tbe world by building temples
and pyramids" (85)- but rejects it as too simple a solution. The new tyranny not only builds enormous public
works which waste private wealth; it then destroys them
by war in order to absorb yet more taxation.
There are other references to classical political theory,
and otber echoes of Aristotle's text. Aristotle had written that under tyranny it is customary "to increase the
poverty of the tyrant's subjects and to curtail their leisure"
(245) and O'Brien modifies that formulation: "Leisure;'
he writes, "must be abolished because the totalitarian state
is erected "on a basis of poverty" (84 ). A much larger
theme develops from the use of Aristotle's second major
conclusion about unjust power: the aim of such power
being to reduce citizens to slaves and conquer their innate "refusal to betray one another or anybody else" (246).
Since that theme is in a sense Orwell's book, it becomes
difficult even to organize resemblances. The phrase "betray" is everywhere in the text. But it is used in a special
sense. It does not mean giving up political secrets under
interrogation- it means giving up human association,
betraying the "spirit" of mutual trust, loyalty, confidence,
and love. This conception dovetails with Aristotle's. He
is intensely concerned with the existential conditions of
the unjust polis. The examples he gives and, as we shall
see, the conclusions he reaches are about the emotional,
spiritual, and ethical effects of tyranny upon association.
The unjust polis, he writes, corrupts the feelings of its
citizens, and intends above all "to break their spirit:'(246)
Before he is tortured, Winston makes an important
distinction between confession and betrayal. We should
be aware that Orwell is having him follow the implication of the Politics: that is to say, confession is a political
29
�act while betrayal is an act directed against human
association. Julia, who is measurably less conscious than
Winston, begins this particular exchange by saying that
"Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you" (73). Winston's reply is as follows:
"I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What
you say or do doesn't matter; only feeling~ matter. If they could
make me stop loving you- that would be the real betrayal."
(73-74)
The distinction is Aristotelian. It signifies not only that
the unjust polis must maintain order but that it must
internalize it. If it prevents "trust" and "confidence" from
developing, it prevents the development of the one thing
it really fears, association independent of political control.
Under torture, Winston first betrays all of humanity, with one vital exception. That is to say, he confesses.
Because confession is not betrayal, he remains, after the first
stage of torture, in some sense immune to the power of
the state. The measure of his character is not only that
he knows this, but admits it:
"You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation
that has not happened to you?"
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still
oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.
"I have not betrayed Julia;' he said.
O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. "No;' he said,
"no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia." (121)
Being a good reader of the Politics, O'Brien knows the
distinction that Winston has unconsciously raised. He
reserves further punishment for him, of the kind that will
assuredly "break" his "spirit:' It is of some interest that
O'Brien's phrase, "you have betrayed everybody and
everything'' rings a change on Aristotle's implicit definition of the free and noble condition: the "refusal to betray
one another or anybody else!'
There is an answering passage, after Winston has
been to Room 101 of the Ministry of Love:
"I betrayed you;' she said baldly.
"I betrayed you;' he said. (129)
Julia's explanation is worth some emphasis: "After that;'
she says, "you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer!' The words are the words of Orwell, but
the ideas are the ideas of the Politics. When mutual trust,
confidence, or love disappear, then the "spirit" has in fact
been broken. Human association, the only rival left to
the power of the state, has itself been "betrayed!'
Sometimes words are identical-a key phrase like
"oligarchy" is an automatic reference to its source. It is
as much an indicator of Plato and Aristotle as the phrase
"surplus labor'' is of Marx. Sometimes the words are only
echoes. But the two texts continuously bear upon each
other. There are some small mysteries which crossreference may be able to clarify. For example, the beginning of Nineteen Eighty-Four is anti-feminist. It is so in
30
a special way, Winston being normally sexual and in fact
highly appreciative of the female body. But he hates
women. Or is it that he fears them?
He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and
pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young
ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the
swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. (6)
Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably; someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl
from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he
had been writing during the lunch interval ... and then drop
a hint in the appropriate quarter. (14)
Since Orwell did not write like this in his other works,
the presumption is that he had something particularly
in mind. I think that he reworked classical misogyny in
this case, which becomes clear if we consider the source
for this idea about "amateur spies!' Aristotle is one of the
great anti-feminists, and he credits women with
totalitarian proclivities. Within slightly more than a single
page in the Politics (244-245) he refers to "a secret police,
like the female spies employed at Syracuse"; to tyrants
who customarily "encourage feminine influence in the
family, in the hope that wives will tell tales of their husbands"; and to the fact that "slaves and women are not
likely to plot against tyrants."
I have so far talked about tactical resemblances between two books. I would like to conclude with a more
strategic assessment. During the course of his torture at
the Ministry of Love Winston discovers the motives of
the Party. They seem to transcend ordinary political ends:
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling.
Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be
capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or
curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall
squeeze you empty, and then fill you with ourselves. (113)
In one sense, this statement reveals the characteristic
megalomania of both O'Brien and the Party. O'Brien is
a character of fiction, and one of the things about him
is that he enjoys assuming the God. But the passage also
has an intense connection to the Politics. It is about
changes in emotion and conception- not really about
political changes at all. It is about human association
specifically; that is, about the feelings which connect people to each other. In short, the passage is about what we
should now call social psychology.
When we come to Aristotle's conclusions about the
aims of tyranny- conclusions which he emphatically
states twice on a single page- we see that he defines the
human changes imposed by tyranny also in terms of social
psychology. In fact, he defines the end of tyranny as the
accomplishment of change in human feelings. The following passage, which sums up Aristotle's view of the ends
of tyranny, is about psychology and ethics:
Their first end and aim is to break the spirit of their subjects.
They know that a poor-spirited man will never plot against
SPRING 1984
�~ybody.
Their second aim is to breed mutual distrust. Tyranny
never overthrown until men begin to trust one another; and
this is the reason why tyrants are always ~touts with the good.
They feel that good men are doubly dangerous to their authori~y -dangerous, first, in thinking it sham!'! to be governed as
tf they were slaves; dangerous, again, in their spirit of mutual
and general loyalty, and in their refusal to betray one another
or anybody else. The third and last aim of tyrants is to make
their subjects incapable of action. (246)
IS
The vocabularies of the two passages are similar. They
are both about human association. They are both about
~oc~a! ,~eeli~gs. Aristotle_ writes about "trust;' "loyalty," and
spint while Orwell wntes about "love; "friendship;' and
"integrity." It may be assumed that they bear on each other
in a certain way, for they both argue that a political relationship is founded on existential conditions. But the passage in Orwell is clearly very extreme. It seems almost
if the use of the term can be imagined, very romantic. It
looks at the history of political exploitation and states
that nothing in the history of the world can match its
own tactics and strategy.
It may be useful to compare O'Brien's sense of the
ends of tyranny with modern historical examples because
criticism of Nineteen Eighty-Four is almost hopelessly bound
up with the belief that the book is about actual totalitarian
regimes. My own sense of the matter is that it does not
make much sense to interpret the revelations which come
about during Winston's torture at the Ministry of Love
entirely as if they reflected "reality:' We know rather a lot
about twentieth-century totalitarianism after reading The
Destructzon of European jewry, The Origins of Totalitarianism,
and The Gulag Arch1pelago. These books are significantly
different from Orwell- that is to say, they perceive ends
different from those stated by O'Brien .. They do not suggest that the modern totalitarian state aims at anything
more than the extinction of opposition. The KGB is not
interested operationally in the feeling per se of dissidents:
it uses torture to beat people down and drugs to make
them helpless or psychotic.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt sumnlarized the state's attitude toward political opposition:
"Criminals are punished, undesirables disappear from
the face of the earth; the only trace which they leave
behind is the memory of those who knew and loved them
:'nd one of the most difficult tasks of the secret polic~
IS to make. sure that even such traces will disappear
together with the condemned man."B And of course it
must be so- in a nation of 250 million prisoners it does
no ~ood at all to have the worst offenders on parole. The
business of the secret police is to eradicate them not
change their minds.
'
!_'he secret P<;>lice are. not romantic nor do they have
a philosophy. Nmeteen E<ghty-Four misleads us if it suggests that we are speaking only of historical possibilities
and examples. Secret police do not read books or worry
about the past, although O'Brien spends an awful lot of
his time doing both. Secret police have what may be called
the opposite of a philosophy, for they do whatever the
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
leadership requires, even if it contradicts what they were
told an hour before. In fact, as Hannah Arendt so brilliantly describes, the secret police find no trouble in doing things clearly contradictory at the same time: awarding some poor befuddled bureaucrat a medal and recommending the firing squad for him.
Need it be added that the secret police are often content with the appearance only of submission? They are
a huge bureaucracy, and find perfection to be quite hopeless. What they want is compliance, not conversions. For
example, in Poland right now the state is quite happy
not to have demonstrations take place: the provocateurs do
not go about arranging for people to undertake resistance
in order to be entrapped.
There certainly seems to be a big difference between
actual totalitarian ends and those stated by Orwell. It
must be fairly plain, if we return to O'Brien's revelation,
that he has no political objective. But he does have a
political-theory objective. And that objective is what
causes the book to have such striking powers of arousing outrage in the reader. It is concerned with what I
should call the nightmare of philosophy. Like the writing
of Machiavelli it holds a dagger to the body of the West.
It might first be noted that there is a difference between the book's quality and its effect. One recognizes
that Nineteen Eighty-Four is an influential but not a great
novel. It cannot be compared to anything by Dickens or
] ane Austen or even to writers not up to their exceptional
standard. Orwell's mind is first-rate and his language is
always a pleasure to read, but clarity and purpose do not
make great art. Why then is Nineteen Eighty-Four, which
IS not a great novel, a great book?
In_part because it ~ddresses a great concern meaningfully; m part because 1t belongs to a series of books and
meditations which have in certain ways not only captured
but formed our imagination. The reader will understand
when I say that this book-which is not great literaturebelongs with the Inferno, with Pilgrim~ Progress, and with
another book sharing its characteristics, The Prince. In
some important ways, even now in the Age of Criticism
not fully understood, such books provide the archetype
of experience: that is to say, we refer back to them to
understand our own experience. Not all of these books
are equal, but each of them has been definitive. Frankenstein is a much lesser work than the Inferno, but it has
become its own kind of datum.
. The reason why Nineteen Eighty-Four belongs with
Pdgnm~ Progress and the rest is its view of the past. Among
a gre~t ma~y other books it has in a singular way come
to gnps w1th a problem that has engaged political
philosophy since its beginnings. That problem, in one
?f 1t~ shapes, has been brilliantly stated by Isaiah Berlin
In his famous essay on Machiavelli:
If Machiavelli is right, if it is in principle (or in fact: the frontier seems dim) impossible to be morally good and do one's
duty as this was conceived by common European, and especially Christian, ethics, and at the same time build Sparta or
31
�Periclean Athens or the Rome of the Rrpublic or even of the
Antonines, then a conclusion of the first importance follows;
that the belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the
question of how men should live can in principle be discovered,
is itself in principle not true. This was a truly erschreckend
proposition. 9
The principle of the good social life is familiar even to
literary critics. We see it at work-and being undermined- in every one of Shakespeare's political plays.
Berlin continues:
One of the deepest assumptions of western political thought
is the doctrine, scarcely questioned during its long ascendancy,
that there exists some single principle which not only regulates
the course of the sun and the stars, but prescribes their proper behavior to all animate creatures. Animals and sub-rational
beings of all kinds follow it by instinct; higher beings attain
to consciousness of it, and are free to abandon it, but only tO
their doom. This doctrine, in one version or another, has
dominated European thought since Plato; it has appeared in
many forms, and has generated many similes and allegories;
at its centre is the vision of an impersonal Nature or Reason
or cosmic purpose, or of a divine Creator whose power has
endowed all things and creatures each with a specific function;
these functions are elements in a single harmonious whole,
and are intelligible in terms of it alone.
This was often expressed by images taken from architecture: of a great edifice of which each part fits uniquely to the
total structure; or from the human body ... or from the life
of society.
We know these great metaphors, in Shakespeare, in Herrick, and in Sir Thomas Browne:
There are two books from whence I collect my divinity; besides
that written one of God, another of his servant nature, that
universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the
eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered
him in the other.10
But such metaphors now have only psychological validity, for since Machiavelli we have been forced to conclude
that they were wrong, that there is no connection between morality and government, or between individual
and "body" politic. Since Machiavelli, Berlin writes, we
have for the most part believed simultaneously in Christian morality and in the political realism of Machiavelli.
But the two contradict each other, for Christianity cannot govern and the state is immoral. It is a Gordian knot.
Philosophers have described the effect of Machiavelli
on the West as "the wound that has never healed." Much
the same might be said of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But
perhaps I ought to put the matter this way: is this book
so traumatic to its audience because of its unequalled
mastery of description of the art of torture? Or because,
as so many suggest, it accurately describes the modern
totalitarian state? Or because of some other reason, a
reason more tragic still, but less visible?
Nineteen Eighty-Four accepts and even exemplifies the
ideas of Machiavelli- not to say the ideas of Lenin, Stalin,
32
and Hitler. But it goes beyond making a fiction of reality. It is about a world without justice. It tells us that
guilt and innocence do not matter, that there is no difference between good and evil. It tells us that the object
of power is power- not pain, not punishment, not
redemption, not correction, not even pleasure. It even
tells us that sanity does not matter, that reason has
nothing to do with rule.
It describes a world of random incident. No matter
how tightly organized the Party may be, and no matter
how strategic its intentions, life in Oceania is a series
of accidents. There is no relationship between necessary
causes and outcomes. Nothing really matters; there is
no definitive boundary between guilt or innocence. Nineteen Eighty-Four offers a great reversal to the concept of
predestination: all within it is a matter of chance. Even
the most perfect monad cannot hold; even Parsons
whispers in his sleep.
Since its beginnings and in all of its times of trouble, the West has feared and rejected the idea of chaos.
We have had much less trouble accepting the idea of the
Apocalypse. Apocalypse is, after all, intelligible. But Nineteen Eighty-Four is built upon the most primitive of
mysteries, of a return to a condition to us so fearful that
our whole mythology is about its transcendance. The
book is much more troubling than the art of the end of
all things. In a sense it is the most illiberal of all books
ever written, for it presupposes that all men will return,
without much troubling themselves, to the chaos which
is the very opposite of civilization.
Even The Gulag Archipelago is about justice, for it is
profoundly concerned with the discrepancies between
Soviet law and punishment. But Nineteen Eighty-Four is
not about the difference between constitutional and actual rights. It is about the nightmare of the West, a nightmare that has been sublimated and soothed by an endless
sequence of meditations on the just society. The reason
why this book is so literally reflective, why it alludes to
Aristotle, Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Lenin, and Hitler,
is that even the last of these had an order in mind. When
Nineteen Eighty-Four tells us that the past is over it means
that the dream of order and justice is itself finished; that
it never corresponded to human actuality. And, even for
moderns, it is a shock to know that the past is over. How
much more of a shock must it be to know that there is
no connection between the self and the polis?
Perhaps the last word ought to be left to a book that
has every few pages intruded into my text and into that
of Orwell: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
tells us, among other things, of the failure of dreams:
In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was
in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe in it. The
idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together
in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labor,
had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.
... But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the
SPRING 1984
�main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The
earthly paradise had been discredited.·. ~90)
To give up the vision of an earthly ,paradise is to give
up more than a myth or speculation. Tt is one of the many
vestiges of history which are to be surrendered. There
is a vision which underlies even this, however. The idea
of a just state, the aggregate of good men, has also
"haunted" or inspired the imagination of the West "for
thousands of years." Why has that been so? First, because
political science itself began in Plato and Aristotle with
that conception: it is by now woven into the strands of
imagination. And second, because the idea of the just
state has always been in critical relationship to the imperfect facts of social life. What Orwell writes aboutwhat makes this book so painful- is the destruction of
those values which make imperfect life endurable.
This book is not frightening because of its absolute
mastery of the detail of torture and disgust. Nor because
it puts totalitarian practice into believable fiction. It
frightens us- arouses what Orwell late in his life called
our "instinctive horror" 11 - because it conceives of a social
order without justice, and of human nature quite capable
ofliving that way. There is one more thing: while Orwell
was writing this book and thinking about it he was reflecting constantly on the development of such a social
order. 12 He was powerfully affected by the futurist novel
li0: by Zamyatin and in his review of it he said, "what
Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular
country but the implied aims of industrial civilization:' 13
That is to say, Orwell himself saw the future of tyranny
as a natural outcome of the ideas and realities of the past.
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Perhaps that is why his own novel of the future has so
much to say about the past, and why his own Grand Inquisitor takes such pride in his idea of progress.
1. From Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (London, 1953), p. 42. Reprinted
in George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, cd. Jeffrey Meyers (London, 1975),
p, 286,
2. The Republic of Plato, ed. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 115.
3. George Orwell, "Such, Such Were the Joys," The Collected Essays, Journalism
and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York,
1968). IV. p, 336,
4. Ibid, p. 338.
5. The Politics of Aristotle, cd. Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1981) p. 245. Subsequent page references arc to this edition. This standard edition was first
published in 1946, just as Orwell began thinking of his novel of the future.
6. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Irving Howe (New York, 1963),
p. 93. Subsequent page references are to this edition.
7. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. George Rawlinson (New York, 1942),
p. 417,
8. Hannah Arendt, The Origins rif Totalitarianism (Cleveland, 1962), p. 433.
On page 426 Arendt writes that "the task of the totalitarian police is not
to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to
arrest a certain category of the population."
9. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (New York, 1980), pp. 66-67.
10. This passage from Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici has been reprinted
in Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, ed. Alexander Witherspoon and Frank
Warnke (New York, 1963), p. 336.
ll. Orwell, "Pleasure Spots," Collected Essays, IV, p. 81.
12. See for example "The Prevention of Literature," Collected Essays, IV, pp.
59-72; the review of We, pp. 72-75; and the letter to Herbert Rogers,
pp. 102-103, all of which speculate on the course of contemporary society, and the relationship of present actualities-many of them
technological-to the future. This volume covers the years 1945-1949, the
last five years of Orwell's life.
13. Orwell, Collected Essays, IV, p. 75.
33
�Is Nature A Republic?
David Stephenson
propose first of all to talk about "energy:' The word
is so common and so current that it is difficult to
extricate ourselves from the conviction that the
conservation of energy comes close to being the
unquestionable foundation of all physics and even
of all nature. Recent decades have made us acutely aware
of the necessary connection between energy and economy,
energy and threat, energy and business. Even news
reports frequently imply that energy is something that
our comforts and lives depend on, and we save, spend,
or waste it with greater consequence than we do money.
It is hard to remember that such universal affirmation
of this law is relatively recent; that three centuries ago
"conservation of energy." was not a conscious part of
anybody's thinking. How can one imagin~ ignorance of
the now so readily acknowledged presumption that
everyone must pay to accomplish a task; that a quantitative equivalence between effort and accomplishment
exists and can be expressed by a mathematical equation?
To question this "work-energy equation" nowadays would
arouse universl astonishment and ridicule. It is quite de
rigueur to presurrie the existence of unknown quantities
just to balance that equation when it seems to fail in some
experiment. Yet when Leibniz announced the first version of this law its apparently frequent failure in practice understandably discouraged many of those otherwise inclined to support his doctrines. There is a historical
mystery here: how did such a profound revolution in consciousness take place between Leibniz's day and our own,
resulting in the universal adoption of his essential theory,
when the overwhelming evidence of daily experience
seems to directly contradict it?
I
Mr. Stephenson, a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, delivered
this lecture at the Santa Fe campus in February 1983.
34
For we see the law apparently broken every day. Think
about it. Bodies skid to a stop, their energy of motion
vanishing into oblivion; the fire warms my hands without
thereby growing perceptibly colder; even the best bouncing ball fails to return quite to the hand that drops it;
clocks need rewinding; I wake up hungry from a sound
sleep; the table sustains a weight forever where my arm
would quickly grow tired. You tell me that I must look
more closely to discover the lost energy of these actions
departing in another form. But that demand really
amounts to assertion of a postulate, that, for example,
motion lost by friction is equivalent to the heat thereby
generated. There is no way of actually proving this
equivalence. The question of whether or not a law of conservation applies has been decided a priori. Might not
Aristotle's non-quantitative treatment of cause better correspond to what we see? Why should the fire lose heat
to what it warms any more than a teacher give up his
knowledge to a pupil in teaching him? And remember
that it is everyday experience that we are considering,
since we are seeking the reasons for the virtually universal
adoption of a law.
Conservational thinking has always persisted in some
form. Probably the oldest form derives from consideration of material things. Aristotle himself makes his four
elements mutually convertible but denies the possibility
of their emerging from nothing. Lucretius presents his
assurance that our bodily atoms will persist after death
as medicine to cure our fear of that event. But many
things are not conserved: knowledge, for example, or
disease, or perhaps even money. If I have a cold, it is
fortunately unnecessary to find someone else to give it
to in order to get rid of it. Money can be devalued or
invested, help to produce surplus value or can be gambled
away. Whatever knowledge you may gain from this lecture has nevertheless not left my side. On the other hand,
SPRING 1984
�conservation seems to be what we expect of whatever is
called "substance;' so our historical problem could be
restated: why and when did energy gain admission to
the category of substance?
If you are in doubt concerning the help offered by
such a metaphysical term, Leibniz will come to your aid
with a definition: "Substance is a being capable of action?'1 This definition even comprises an embryonic statement of the conservation law we seek. For consider a pendulum. Beginning at rest, it descends with increasing
velocity and then ascends and comes to rest again
momentarily before repeating and repeating the cycle of
motion and rest. Something, therefore, in the pendulum
even at rest is capable of the action that is manifest in
its subsequent motion. This substance, called "absolute"
or "living force" by Leibniz and later "energy"2 by others,
also appears to be transferable from body to body in an
elastic collision. In practice, however, some of this
substance, energy, always vanishes during any collision,
and it is quite possible to make the motion disappear entirely in what is called an "inelastic impact?' Fully aware
of the challenge to his theory of absolute force offered
by this experiment, Leibniz insists that despite appearances none of his precious substance is really lost:
it merely comes to be distributed insensibly among the
infinite infinitesimal parts of the bodies themselves after
such an inelastic collision. But this is an appeal to faith,
not evidence.
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
d _____ -"'
,_I
''-~'......
-
As pointed out later in the eighteenth century, the
theoretical justification for this faith immediately follows
if one makes another assumption, viz, that all interactions between bodies depend only on the distances between their particles, regarded as points. But even
Boscovich, whose universe is just such a sprinkling of
massy points separated by forces, and who thought in
other respects to have reconciled Newton and Leibniz,
refused to follow this hypothesis to its conclusion and rejected conservation of energy in the face of those vivid
violations exhibited by the inelastic impact that
characterizes our visible world.
Moreover, this example of inelastic impact may have
claims on us a priori, as it did on Newton, and on Maupertuis and others of Newton's successors during the succeeding century. For if we, like them, are true atomists- if
we commit ourselves to the belief that our material world
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is assembled out of ultimately indivisible particles having some, though minute, extension- then these particles
must be absolutely hard: they cannot flex and change
shape as elasticity requires because they would then have
to have distinct parts. "If;' says Maupertuis, "in the majority of bodies the parts which compose them separate
or bend, this happens only because these bodies are heaps
of other bodies: simple bodies, primitive bodies, which
are the elements of all the others must be hard, inflexible, unalterable."3 Contact between such hard atoms,
therefore, could only follow the model of inelastic impact. Leibniz, in fact, only avoids this rock because he
denies the world an atomic foundation: matter is infinitely divisible.
Nevertheless, Maupertuis is not perfectly confident
of his atomic prejudices:
It appears, therefore, that one would be better grounded
in maintaining that all primitive bodies are hard, than
one would be in claiming that there are no hard bodies
whatever in nature. However, I do not know if the manner in which we know bodies permits us either the one
or the other assertion. 4
T
his doubt, together with a kind of natural piety,
led him to the formulation of one of the great
principles of physics, but one which does not depend on a special understanding of material constitution: the Principle of Least Action. ((When some change
in Nature happens, the Quantity of Action necessary for
this change is as small as possible." ((Quantity of Action"
he then defines to be the "product of the mass of the
bodies by their speed and by the space they travel:' 5 The
universality and unity of this principle obviously support and confirm Maupertuis's dedication to the discovery
of God's work in the world. For God, or Nature under
his dominion, thereby displays a kind of economy or even
parsimony. The Quantity of Action is not conserved, but
as little as possible appears at each natural event. The
relevance of final cause seems not to have vanished from
physics 6
With appropriate zeal Maupertuis seeks to derive
from this principle the known mathematical laws governing a variety of phenomena, including the refraction of
light, the equilibrium
of a balance or lever,
and both elastic and
inelastic impact. In
later, more capable
hands the Principle
emulates the fruitfulness
of Newton's Laws, in this
century proving remarkably
adaptable to Quantum
Theory and Relativity.
With great deference to
Maupertuis, his younger
B
contemporary, Euler, derived
35
�the path of a falling body from the principle, and
Lagrange and Hamilton soon afterwards based entire
systems of physics upon it. Maupertuis himself misapplied it. But in attempting to address the problem of impact he really invoked without realizing it the primitive
form of a totally different principle: the Principle of Least
Constraint.
To distinguish these two principles it should help to
compare them in their simplest manifestations:
1. Least Action involves the product oflength, velocity,
and mass. A ball thrown into the air describes a particular
arc ACB. The Principle of Least Action states that the
total action involved with this path is less than it would
be for any other under the same conditions. That is,
although the path is shorter for a flatter arc, e.g. ADB,
the velocity- determined by the height above the
ground' -will have to increase so much with respect to
corresponding points on the original arc that the sum
of the products of mass, velocity, and path segment for
the new path -which sum makes up the total actionwill exceed that for the original path ACB. Conversely
a longer path AEB, while decreasing the corresponding
velocities, more than makes up for this in the product
IfW~AC, W'~BC; U~BC, U'~AC.
IfW~AB, W'~O, U~BC, U'~AC.
Other supposititious values for U, U': BD, AD.
v.A
c
D
~
B
From the figure
EU2=Ac2+BC2 AD2+BD2
i.e., less than the supposititious EU2.
Example of two equal bodies with equal velocities AC, BC, and sticking to remain motionless at C thereafter (the actual case), or moving off together with velocity CD (a supposed alternative case). In
the first case velocities AC and BC would be lost upon impact, so
that these would represent U and U', the "deviations from free motion" caused by their meeting. The "constraint'' would according to
Carnot be represented by a quantity proportional to the squares of
these losses, i.e., to the rectangle on AB. On the other hand, the supposed alternative case would produce losses represented by AD and
DB, and "constraints" therefore proportional to the squares on these
lines, whose sum is clearly greater than this rectangle.
36
by the increased path length. Actual computation will
confirm the fact that the minimal path must be Galileds
parabola.
2. Least Constraint. A body, or (and this is the important case) a whole system of bodies linked together
rigidly, will move in such a way that the deviation in each
part from free motion is as small as possible. The
previously mentioned examples of inelastic impact satisfy
this principle in the following way: "free motion" in this
case would signifY that the bodies could be imagined as
not impeding one another, i.e., as penetrating one another
freely with velocities W, W', etc. Now the real nature
of the impact compelling the colliding bodies to each alter
its motion by amounts U, U ', etc. the principle determines this subsequent motion on the basis of collective
minimum for these deviations U. 8 One can easily
demonstrate in a Euclidean manner that the results of
the inelastic impact of equal balls we earlier saw are
precisely prescribed by this requirement alone.
However different these two principles appear, they
are yet more removed from the Newtonian- and to us
probably more familiar-world of push and pull, offorce
and resistance. For everything is by them determined
from a consideration of the whole array of what is possible, the actual motions we observe selected by Nature
according to their obedience to a universal principle involving some kind of economy. The whole procedure
resembles much more closely the planning and choice
we exercise consciously than does Newton's. Exactly what
is saved in the case of the second principle may not at
present be clear, but we will return to consider it later. 9
It was Lazare Carnot who first recognized the distinctness as well as the independent validity of the second principlel° Carnot is also largely responsible for
the discovery of a new quantity that is conserved in all
physical activity. He calls this quantity "moment-ofactivity" and identifies it with some very ordinary and
vulgar notions; of labor in particular and of wages; of
animal or human muscle power; of power drawn from
wind or water; of machines used to direct that power.
His practical interests in fact may provide the clue we
need to solve our original historical riddle of energy. For
our earlier dilemma can be resolved into two distinct
problems:
1. How can we account for the apparent loss of energy
in every physical activity? 2. How can such manifestly
different phenomena as heat, motion, and electric or
muscle power, all ultimately claimed to be different forms
of energy, be made to exhibit this essential kinship? The
questions are complementary. A reply to the second will
answer the fust. But this can only be done by the mediation of another concept, the concept of "work." Wind,
water, and fire can all drive engines whose work can be
quantitatively compared to what muscle can do. The conversion of motion into heat through friction can then,
at least theoretically, be restored to its original form by
letting that heat drive a suitable engine. Energy thereby
SPRING 1984
�becomes a substance taking various forms, but all of
which can exhibit the action we call ('work."
T
he name, Lazare Carnot, evokes very different
reactions in different circles. Scientists would
nowadays remember him, if at all, as an obscure
eighteenth century engineer preoccupied with machines
and their efficiency, and the author of ''Carnot's
Theorem;' which predicts that the more abrupt the
change the greater the amount of"living force" lost. Percussion of the parts in a machine makes it less efficient;
rapid acceleration- as in an automobile- wastes fuel. His
son, Sadi, is more famous, since he founded the science
of thermodynamics. To the politically or historically
minded, on the other hand, Lazare Carnot stirs up
memories of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Insulated from the first violent days of revolution
by prison walls, because he had been incarcerated after
presuming to propose marriage to his noble mistress, he
soon took charge of the new republic's military forces.
Although disorganized and discouraged by some military
defeats in the face of repeated attempts by other European nations to destroy the young republic and restore
royalty to France, the army under his leadership managed
to secure French borders and thereby save the republican
form of government from foreign invasion. As a member
of the Directorate and the Committee on Public Safety
he even survived Robespierre, without, so he later
claimed, condoning its bloody purges more than necessary.11 His association with Napoleon during the early
campaigns did not inspire him to accept more than a temporary post in the First Consul's government, and he even
dared to protest publically Napoleon's elevation to
emperor. Retiring to a private life of scientific and
engineering pursuits during the first decade of the nineteenth century, he did rejoin the army for the last
Napoleonic campaigns, earning thereby a final exile in
Germany, devoted primarily to writing memoirs defending his actions during the Terror. And in truth his greatest
passion seems always to have been the cause of republican
government.
His scientific works, though relatively few, all display
a unique marriage of the practical and the abstract. Consider, for example, his concept of a "machine." What he
calls a "machine in general" is any system of objects linked
together so that consecutive masses can neither approach
nor recede from one another: the links are rigid but the
machine as a whole need not be, since its parts may be
hinged even while they are linked by rigid connections.
Any ordinary machine, from a simple lever to the most
complicated factory engines satisfies this definition. But
so does a single rigid body, such as a baseball bat or a
hammer: their parts are rigidly connected. The curious
behavior of a top, gyroscope, or frisbee exhibits the unexpected effects of these linkages. Most animals- including
human beings- resemble machines, for their bones do
keep joints at fixed distances. 12 Most surprising of all,
perhaps: water and other practically incompressible fluids
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
are machines, as long as they remain in one continuous
or connected mass. For being incompressible, the fluid's
consecutive parts stay the same distance apart; they can
slide or rotate around one another but not approach one
another (imagine smooth sand in an hour glass). It is
in fact characteristic of Carnot's thinking that the agents
which operate machines are themselves in part machines,
especially since he ultimately can include elastic connections (like muscles), as well as rigid ones, within the same
theory.
Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and virtually all their successors agree on one subject: uniform rectilinear motion
is as natural as rest, so that any body will continue
whatever motion it has in a straight line if free to do so.
What happens, then, when moving bodies are linked
together to form a machine? Obviously their masses
mutually impede or assist one another. A lot of pushing
and shoving goes on, the resultant motion being a compromise, since each constituent body must depart in some
measure from its free motion. And this compromise continues to be worked out afresh each moment. The Law
of Least Constraint is an expression of this compromise.
By its means we can begin to understand why a spinning top does not fall over, the inertial motion of one
part counteracting the falling tendency of another. We
can also see how Galilee's experiments on inclined planes,
which he presumed to illuminate the motion of falling
bodies, could be corrected: the mutual constraint of the
parts of a rolling ball producing quite a different effect
from one that falls without rotating."
But it need not rest with the imagination alone to
demonstrate the effects of mutual constraint by the parts
of such "machines-in-general:' We can reduce these effects to experience: the experience of inelastic impact.
If one considers this experience, one can easily see that
before impact the bodies move freely (at least with respect
to one another); after impact their motion is constrained;
they are linked together as by rigid connections. Carnot's general conclusions about machines, therefore, can
be tested by experiment. Furthermore, the exact reverse
of inelastic impact is explosion, and one can view elastic
collision as the combination of these two phenomena:
inelastic impact followed by explosion. Thus elastic impact or connection may be regarded as a special case of
inelastic impact.
But whereas the Principle of Least Constraint seems
peculiarly well adapted to our understanding of machines, the equation of work and energy, or "momentof-activity" and "living force;' does not enlighten us so
obviously in this respect. After all, these machines all
seem necessarily to change the form of energy in ways
not entirely within our control, and any such change in
form can not be understood as a purely mechanical transformation. With this problem I arrive at the heart of my
thesis, one which I state with the more caution because
Carnot himself is not explicit about it, as far as I know.
It can be derived from his work by inference, but by inference only. I infer it primarily from the fact that the
37
�abrupt changes exemplified by inelastic collision are
primary for him, although he is not·'! confirmed atomist,
and so does not need to make this hypothesis 14
W
hat is crucial to Carnot's point- of view is his
refusal to get lost in the details of a problem.
He looks at phenomena grossly rather than
closely, and this "gross vision" is what I believe allows him
to ignore our ignorance of the inner mechanics of bodies
and machines._ If"a body meet a body;' the more intimate
consequences of this meeting seem to depend very much
on private matters beyond our ken. That is, for I am of
course thinking of mechanics, whether the bodies have
a continuous or atomic internal structure, whether they
or their parts are hard or soft, elastic or inelastic, it remains true that collision alters their motions. It is possible for Carnot to say something significant by consciously
ignoring the doubtful processes of impact, and confining
his attention to their relatively simple relationships before
and after impact. Motion is probably conveyed from one
body to all the parts of another through an incredibly
complex sequence of inner vibrations and interactions;
yet when this inward disquiet has subsided the bodies
do have some motion as wholes, and this latter motion
is the focus of his apparent interest. One could perhaps
see him as anticipating the modern quantum physicist's
tendency to imagine particles entering and leaving a
"sphere of ignorance;' within which they affect one
another in some mechanically indeterminate way. The
assumption of such a "sphere of ignorance" then permits
one to be relatively knowledgeable about what happens
outside that sphere, and the relationships between objects before and after entering it. Inelastic impact from
this point of view amounts merely to a succession of
events in which bodies at first moving independently of
one another are somehow-we need not say how-constrained to move off together.
What does this "gross vision" mean for energy? The
following dialog imagined between Carnot and Leibniz
should answer this question:
Carnot~'I observe rigid bodies and connections all around
me, and many degrees of absurpt and inelastic impact but
nothing so perfectly elastic as to entirely conserve your 'living force'?'
Leibniz~'But these bodies can not be perfectly inflexible,
for my reason demands that changes take place gradually,
according to Nature's great Law of Continuity. The transfer
of motion from one body to another takes time; viz., the
time during which those bodies remain in contact while
changing shape."
Carnot~'ln that case, as I have shown mathematically, no
'living force' would ever be lost!"
Leibniz (with evident satisfaction)~'Exactly!"
Carnot~'Nevertheless one ought to explain the appearance
of such a loss. It is after all manifest that 'living force' does
disappear from the scene of action in most, perhaps even
in all actions where bodies do not move freely but constrain
one another."
38
Leibniz~'I am content to find that you have confirmed my
expectations for the eternal survival of'absolute force; and
that the Principle of Continuity required by reason has in
fact entailed this survival. Look closely enough at an apparent discontinuity in Nature and you will discover continuity."
Carnot ~'Why should I not trust my observation that
changes do often happen abruptly, and that in fact the more
abrupt the more 'living force' lost?"
Leibniz ~'Your senses are not fine enough. They need to be
corrected by reason?'
Carnot~'But you are looking too closely! The trees are
obscuring the forest. Even if as you say motion and 'living
force' does survive in the microscopic motions of a body's
parts, it remains irretrievable for me. The gross picture remains the significant one. Perhaps it is true that 'living force'
is never lost, but it is always wasted, sometimes more and
sometimes less. That is, it is lost for all practical purposes."
At this point we might add two other characters to
our imagined dialog. Robert Mayer or Joule, or even
Count Rumford if present would no longer be able to
restrain his impatience ---='But you are talking about heat!
Could I not recover the 'living force; which you think
is permanently wasted, by applying the heat it generates
to run an engine?"
It is not Lazare Carnot, but his son Sadi who answers
this question. The answer is "No. There is no hope of
recovering all that 'living force'." Unfortunately
unavoidably abrupt changes in the temperature have the
same effect on a heat engine that the abrupt changes
characteristic of inelastic impact have on a purely
mechanical one: Loss, not of energy, but of usable energy.
This is an expression of the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, of which therefore the elder Carnot's
theorem proves to be an adumbration.
This kind of a dialog somehow reminds me of Plato's
"Phaedo:' All of Socrates's assurances of immortality can
not entirely dispel the grief of his friends in the face of
his impending death. Nor should it. It is at least as true
that he will leave this world as that he will survive somewhere else. So with energy, whose loss and preservation
inevitably and paradoxically take place simultaneously."
R
eturning to our original political question, we can
now easily see that Maupertuis's principle implies a naturla monarchy; Carnot's republic. The
success of the Principle of Least Action compares most
easily with the government of a single intelligence, which
chooses the course and concourse of bodies from among
all possibilities according to the end desired and a single
prevailing principle of economy. The Principle of Least
Constraint, on the other hand, is a kind of law of
freedom. Every body or particle deviates as little as possible from its free flight, and it does so only in order to
accommodate the greatest possible compatible general
freedom for all the others. Nature thus resembles the most
perfectly democratic republic. 16 A presiding intelligence
SPRING 1984
�may have been necessary to organize such a scheme, but
not to take part in its normal daily progress by specific
decisions.
We might further extract from this latter principle
the suggestion that, because of the continual jostle and
readjustment of small motions, the most fruitful view of
Nature would be to concentrate on the overall net effect, i.e., to adopt what I have called Carnot's "gross vision:' The concept of"work" or "moment-of-activity" then
goes one step further by disregarding all difference in
the forms of energy in the interest of a reliable quantitative judgment. But·as we have seen, this same vision
that confirms the conservation of energy denies us the
means to fully exploit it. The full fruitfulness of energy
emphasized by its equivalence in "work" is ultimately
snatched from us.
Whether Carnot's political experience guided his
scientific research or his science his politics is hard to
decide, but one cannot escape the suggestion of mutual
influence. Carnot might even have considered the
resemblance between revolution and abrupt change, but,
unable to prevent the inevitable losses in either case,
sought to minimize themY If you think it was sang froid
rather than cold blood that enabled him to maintain his
position in the ruling Committee during the Terror, then
you probably base your admiration on our present
knowledge of the final outcome of his and others' connivance: that is the French Republic itself. As to the
details of his actions during this tumultuous period: don't
look too closely!
Carnot's Principle of Least Constraint bespeaks a kind
of natural republic; I do not know what political
analogues there might be for work and energy, or for
the joining of these concepts in which he played a major
part. The quantification of endeavor implied by them,
however, does emphasize by contrast all the human ventures that elude quantification. The importance of the
former magnifies the latter: against "work" we must
balance "play." A contemporary of Carnot, Friedrich
Schiller, expressed succinctly the importance of this: "Man
plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,
and he is only wholly Man when he is playing. 18 But that is
a subject worthy of another whole lecture.
1. Leibniz, "Principles of Nature and of Grace, Founded on Reason."
2. The man responsible for introducing "energy" as a technical term
with roughly the modern meaning (but with scope limited to simple mechanics) into English was Thomas Young (cf. his lecture
"On Collision": number 8 from'~ Course of Lectures on Natural
Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts;' vol. I, esp. p. 78; cf. also
vol. II, p. 52, §347). Though obviously deriving from Aristotle's, Evsj)ysm the word appeared more in literature than in scientific writing before the nineteenth century, and, with the exception of Jean Bernoulli's occasionally prophetic adoption of the
French "energie;' seems to have born the more figurative than
mathematically decipherable sense of "eagerness" and "assidu-
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
itY.' In the works of David Hume this literary term does approach
the scientific one.
3. Maupertuis, "Les lois du movement et du repos deduites d'un
principe meta physique;' reproduced in vol V of the collection
of Euler's works, "Leonhard Euleri Opera Omnia'' (Lausanne
1957), p. 294.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. p.298.
6. This conclusion, however, may be qualified by the fact that, as
discovered by Hamilton, under certain circumstances there is
a maximum of action, and in general only an extreme, or, as he
calls it, "stationary" value of action is required.
7. Knowledge of energy relations may be seen to be implicit in this
statement, even though all that seems necessary is something
which determines velocity as a function of height alone.
8. Actually it is the same 1:MU 2 that is minimized for all masses
M, M', etc., and deviations, U, U', etc., the square serving to
make all quantities positive. Carnot's manipulation of these fictitious quatities, U and U', etc., derives directly from the
mechanics of d'Alembert, who used them largely to avoid what
he saw as the too metaphysical concept of "force." Carnot's own
impatience with metaphysics may also have its source here.
9. It is, however, a true minimum principle, unlike the first one.
10. The name "Principle of Least Constraint;' or "Prinzip der
kleinstel); Zwange;' comes from the mathematician Gauss (cf. his
paper, "Uber ein neues allgemeines Grundgetsetz der Mechanik;'
pp. 25-28 in "Werke," Bd. 5 (G6ttingen 1877). Whether or not
Gauss knew ofCarnot's work might be worth investigating. The
latter, however, explicitly recognized the beauty of this principle
even without such an appropriate name. After rigorously deriving the principle from Newton's laws, Gauss remarked on the
curious coincidence of its having the same mathematical form
as the important statistical law of least squares, of which he was
the author: was the same natural law appearing in two different
guises?
11. He did, for example, mercilessly extirpate such potential anarchists as Babeuf.
12. Carnot, however, carefully avoided the logical fallacies of
J.un:d.j3ucw; ei~ liAA.o yEvo<; and infinite regress involved in any
assumption that the will or desires were essentially mechanical.
Thus he says in his "Principes" (§73): ''Je rCpeterai d'abord, qu'il
ne s'agit point ici des causes premiCres qui font na'itre le mouvement dans les corps, mais seulement du mouvement dCj.3. produit et inherent a chacun d'eux."
13. The descent of a yoyo is the true limiting case of a body rolling
down in increasingly vertical plane.
14. I do not know of any statement by Carnot expressly concerning
atoms. However, the following assertion in his "Essai" (par.
XLVII) about fluids could hardly have been made by anyone
committed to a merely finite division of material in the world:
"On peux regarder un fluide comme l'assemlage d'une infinite
de corpuscules solides, detaches Jes uns des autres
~· His
definition of "fluid" in the "Principes" (§12) is a little more
cautious: "Les fluides sont ceux qui se trouvent divisCs en parties si fines, qu'elles echappent a tousles sens aides des meilleurcs
instrumens. Tels sont l'eau, l'air. Un fluide parfait seroit la limite
vers Iaquelle tendent tous ces fluidcs a mesure que Ia tenuitC des
particules est plus complCt. On ignore s'il existe un pareil fluide."
15. But lest I carry this analogy too far, I refuse to assert that just
as the engineer may see his task as preventing the loss of "living
force" as long as possible, so should Socrates seek to stay alive
at all costs.
16. Not necessarily a purely egalitarian republic: individual mass
is a factor in the calculation of constraint.
17. Consider, for example, Napoleon's opinion that Carnot was "easily deceived" simply because, as construed by Louis Madelin in
his "The French Revolution," he desired to bring order out of
chaos. (Heinemann English ed., p. 490)
18. Fifteenth letter of Friedrich Schiller's "On the Aesthetic Education of Man." (Ungar English ed., p. 80)
39
�Between Plato and Descartes The Mediaevel Transformation
Ontological Status of the Ideas
•
In
James Mensch
I
E
ven the most casual reader of philosophy senses
the abyss that separates Descartes from Plato.
In Descartes a concern for certainty overshadows and, in fact, transforms the original
Platonic conception of philosophy. Such a conception, as exemplified by the figure of Socrates, involves
fundamentally a love of wisdom. Wisdom- ao<pia- is
not the same as certainty. That which I can be certain
of does no I> necessarily make me wise (see Phaedo, 98 b ff.)
We can mark out the difference between Plato and
Descartes in terms of two constrasting pairs of terms: trust
and opinion for Plato, doubt and certainty for Descartes.
Plato describes our attitude to the visible realm as one
of trust -rr(cr~u; (see Republic, 511 e). Descartes begins his
Meditations by doubting his perceptions. For Plato, the
examination of opinion is a necessary first step in the
philosophical ascent to the highest things. He depicts
Socrates as enquiring into the opinions of the most
various sorts of men. There is in Socrates a certain trust
in the existence of "true" or "right" opinions. At times,
such opinions can become "hypotheses"; they can become
stepping stones leading to "what is free from hypothesis"
(Republic, 511 b). For Descartes, precisely the opposite attitude is assumed. Because of his lack of such trust, he
begins his Meditations by withdrawing from the company
of men and systematically doubting every opinion he has
hitherto accepted on trust. His position is summed up
by the statement: "... reason already persuades me that
James Mensch is author of a recently published book on The Question of Being in Husser/'s Logical Investigations. He is an alumnus of St.
John's College, Annapolis.
40
I ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than
from those which appear to me manifestly to be false .. :'
("Meditation I;' Philosophical works of Descartes, trans. E.
Haldane and G. Ross, New York, 1955, p. 145).
This lack of assent, of qualified trust, reveals the
transformation that philosophy undergoes in Descartes'
hands. It is a transformation of philosophy from a love
of wisdom to a love of certainty. Certainty, even if it concerns what is apparently trivial, becomes the philosopher's
goal. Here, we may observe that the certainty Descartes
pursues has an absolute, almost mathematical character.
His assent will only be given to matters "entirely certain
and indubitable." This is a sign that certainty has, indeed, become the object of Descartes' philosophical love.
What a philosopher loves and, hence, pursues must, in
Descartes' eyes, be something absolute; nothing less than
absolute certainty will satisfy Descartes.
How did this transformation occur? Our thesis is that
it is a result of a transformation in the minds of
philosophers of what it means for an idea or eloo<; to be.
More precisely put, it is the result of a transformation,
occurring in the Middle Ages, in the philosophical notion of the ontological status of the idea. Because of this
transformation, doubt replaces trust in our perceptions.
In the consequent shifting world of doubt, certainty
becomes the necessary object of both the beginnings and
final end of our philosophical enquiries.
II
B
efore we present the historical evidence for our
thesis, we must be clear on what is meant by our
term, ontological status. The term signifies "status
of being:' An entity can be said to have the status of a
merely possible being. Alternately, it can be said to have
SPRING 1984
�the status of an actual existent. Here, we must note that
the question of the content of a being-the question of
its essence or "whatness'!_ is a question distinct from that
of its ontological status. Whether something is, i.e., whether
it is actual or merely a possible existent- is not answered
by giving a concept delineating what the entity is. As
Thomas Aquinas puts this: "I can know what a man or
a phoenix is and still be ignorant whether it exists in reality" (De Ente et Essentia, ch. 4, ed. Roland-Gosselin, Kain,
Belgium, 1926, p. 34 ). Kant expresses the same point
by writing, '''Being' is obviously not a real predicate; that
is, it is not a concept of something which could be added
to the concept of a thing'' (Kitrik d. r. V, B 636). If it were
a real predicate, i.e., part of the concept of a thing, then
from knowing the what, I could know the whether- i.e.,
whether the concept refers to an actual or a merely possible existent. That this is not the case is shown by the fact
that there is not the least difference in content between
the thought of a possible existent and the conception that
arises from its actual presence. As Kant observes, the
thought of a hundred possible thalers contains the same
amount of coins as a hundred actual thalers (see Kritik
d. r. V, B 637). It is because of this that loans can be
repaid, or, more generally, that what we think of as merely
possible can be encountered and recognized in reality.
If being did make a conceptual difference, if it was
something "added to the concept of a thing," then when
I was actually repaid, I would reply, "This is not what
I had in mind when I thought of the possibility of
repayment:'
The distinction we have given has a technical name.
It is called "the distinction between being and essence."
"Essence;' as Aquinas says, "is what the definition of a
thing signifies" (De Ente et Essentia, ch. 2, ed. cit., p. 7).
It is the content of an idea, the idea, e.g., of a man or a
phoenix as delineated by its definition. Being, as distinct
from essence, refers to ontological status. Admitting this
distinction between being and essence, we must also admit that what is defined conceptually is not specified according to its mode of being. The question of its ontological status, the question concerning the actual or merely
possible being of what is defined, is not answered through
its definition.
This point applies directly to our thesis about the
ideas. It does so because the ideas, considered simply in
themselves, are the same as essences. An essence, as we
said, is the content of an idea. An idea, however, is just
its own content and nothing more. It is, we can say, a
pure conceptual unit. It is such by virtue of the fact that
it is, in itself, simply the conceptual content which a
definition delineates. Given the fact that idea and essence
denote the same thing, what we said about the essence
applies to the idea. The latter, too, is necessarily silent
on the question of being. Otherwise put: no examination of an idea as it is in itself- i.e., as a pure conceptual unit- can answer the question of actual versus possible being. This silence on the question of being, based
as it is on the very nature of the idea, is absolutely general.
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
It, thus, applies to the question of the idea's own ontological status. If we attempt to answer it by considering the conceptual content that is the idea, we are always
free to answer it in two possible ways. We are free to give
the idea the ontological status of a possibility or an
actuality.
III
T
he history of philosophy gives ample evidence
of this freedom. For the moderns, the idea has the
ontological status of a possibility. To illustrate
this, we shall take three prominent figures: Kant,
Whitehead and Husser!. According to Kant, every conception that the understanding itself grasps is grasped
under the aspect of possibility (see "Kritik d. U rtheilskraft;' Kanis Werke, Berlin, 1968, v, 402). For very
different reasons, Whitehead concurs. Ideas or essences
are "eternal objects?' But, as he says, "... the metaphysical
status of an eternal object is that of a possibility for an
actuality . . . actualization is a selection amongst
possibilities" (Science and the Modern World, New York, 1974,
p. 144 ). Husser!, who would not at all be found in
Whitehead's camp, agrees on this one point: possibility
and essentiality are the same. The reason he gives for
this is that the being of an idea is the being of an ideal
or pure possibility (see Logische Untersuchungen, 5th ed.,
Tuebingen, 1968, I, 129, 240, II/1, 115, II/2, 103). Such
examples could be multiplied. In modern times, the idea
is universally given the status of a possibility: an empirically grounded possibility for the empiricists, an ideal
or "puren possibility for the idealists. In neither case are
ideas considered to be actualities.
For Plato, however, this was just what the ideas or
dol] were when he introduced them into philosophical
discourse. He names them oUaia which is taken from the
participle of the verb to be, etV<ll. A corresponding root
is found in the word essence, in Latin, essentia. The root
esse means in Latin to be. To call something oUaia or essentia was to say that it actually is. It has what is signified
by the verb to be. The same point can be made by looking at the divided line (see Republic, 509 d-511 e). In a
proportion involving the ratio between reality and image, the ideas are at the top. They are supremely real.
They possess oucriu in the highest degree.
One of the ways to see why this is so is to look at
Parmenides' statement: TO yUp o.lYrO voEiv Eanv 'tE Ko.i
dvo.t. We can translate this as "the same thing exists for
thinking and being;' and take this to mean: "the same
thing can be thought as can be." 1 So understood, we have
a statement of logical equivalence: thinkability implies
being and being implies thinkability. Now, whether or
not this understanding agrees with Parmenides' original
intention, it does yield a notion that for Plato is crucial
for the status of the ideas. This is that thinkability and
being pertain to the same thing. More precisely expressed, that which makes it possible for a thing to be
also makes it possible for it to be thinkable. The com-
41
�mon ground of these possibilities is self-identity or selfsameness. This self-identity will turn out to be a mysterious quality. For the moment, hoWever, we may define
it as the quality of something remai11ing the same with
itself.
·
That such a quality is at the root of being is affirmed
by Plato when he writes that "the very being of to be"the (w-rit f} oi'Jaia -roU dvat- is to be "always in the same
manner in relation to the same things!' As Plato explains,
this is to be "unchanging" and, thus, to remain the same
with oneself. The ideas, "beauty itself, equality itself, and
or self-sameness. This self-identity is, we observe, what
allows us to take the divided line and see it as a hierarchy of beings with the ideas at the top. Levels of being
could not be ordered and ranked if there were not a single
standard of being by which to measure them. This, for
Plato, is the self-sameness which images, things, mathematical objects and ideas respectively possess to a more
and more perfect degree.
IV
every itself' are called "being'!...... 'tO Ov- and this, because
they "do not admit of any change whatsoever" (Phaedo,
78 d). Platds position follows from Parmenides' statement
and an analysis of what change means. Its fundamental
intuition is that change is always change of something.
This something is an underlying self-identity. The consequence is that real loss of self-identity is not change.
It is rather annihilation pure and simple of the individual.
Now, the presence of self-identity not only makes possible the persistent being in time of the individual, it also
makes possible the predication of an idea of this individual. If change negated all self-identity, then nothing
in our changing world could have any intelligible name
or sense. Let us take an example: a person proceeding
from a newborn baby to extreme old age. It is the
presence of some self-identical element in this process
that allows us to predicate the idea "human" of this individual. When the person dies, this is no longer possible. What answers to the concept "human" is no longer
there. The point is that self-identity is required both for
being and being thought. What is not self-identical cannot be thought and cannot be.
A number of consequences follow from this reasoning. The first is that the ability to recognize being and
the ability to predicate an idea of a thing always occur
together. They must, if they are both based on the apprehension of an underlying self-identity. Given that
predicating an idea of a thing is the same as the recognition of the thing as intelligible, "being" and "intelligibility"
must be understood as co-extensive terms. One cannot
ascribe the one without ascribing the other; whatever has
a share in being must also have a share in intelligibility.
Now, participation- !J.E'tEXEtV- means literally "having
a share in." It, thus, follows that participation must be
understood as participation in both being and intelligibility. We can put this in terms of the Platonic doctrine that
a thing is intelligible by virtue of its participating in its
idea. The idea itself is the conceptual expression of the
self-identity that Plato calls the oucriu of to be. Thus, one
can also say that a thing has being by virtue of its participating in its idea-i.e., participating in the self-identity
that the idea expresses in terms of an unchanging concept. From this it follows that participation demands a
single notion of being, one common to both the thing
and its idea. A thing could not possess its being by virtue of its participation in its idea if both did not exist
by virtue of the same oucriu of to be. This is self-identity
42
H
ow does the transformation between Plato and
the moderns occur? How do the ideas, from being understood as pure actualities-i.e., entities
capable of being called 16 ov- become for the moderns
expressions of possibility? From a philosophical standpoint, the answer to this question has already been indicated. Our paper's position is that self-identity is not
a sure criterion of being. In particular, it does not point
to the actual as opposed to the merely possible. The
reason for this is that, like any other conceptual content,
self-identity is part of the essential determination of a
thing. As forming part of a thing's essence, it is silent
on the question of the status of the being of a thing. Thus,
to return to Kant's example, we can say that a possible
entity-a hundred possible thalers-possess as much selfidentity as an actual identity. Granting this, we must admit that self-identity does not distinguish between the
actual and the possible. An argument for the actuality
of the ideas, which is based, like Plato's, on their selfidentity, is thUs bound to fail. Here, indeed, we can find
the underlying reason for the ambiguity which, as we
shall see, characterizes the use of the term "self identitY:'
The concept per se is not ambiguous, its meaning being
simply sameness with self. It becomes ambiguous when
we attempt to make it into a criterion of being, something which no concept is fitted to do.
For Plato, the attempt to make self-identity a standard of being arises in connection with his doctrine of participation. As we have seen, entities have being to the
point that they participate-or have a share-in selfidentity. How are we to understand the self-identity which
is to be shared in? We cannot understand it as simple
identity with self. That which shares with another its
identity with self would either absorb the other into its
own identity or else lose itself in the identity of the other.
Thus, if the ideas and things are related by virtue of their
sharing in self-identity, either the idea would absorb the
thing or vice versa. A similar difficulty arises when we
take self-identity as the quality of being one. Is the oneness
to be referred to the oneness of a thing or to the oneness
of the idea?
The Parmenides shows Platds awareness of the difficulty
we are pointing to. He has Parmenides ask Socrates
whether "... the whole idea is one and yet, being one,
is in each of the many" (Farm., 131 a, Jowett trans.).
Socrates agrees that this is his meaning and further agrees
SPRING 1984
�that things must participate either in the whole of an idea
or in a part of it. Both, however, seem to be impossible.
Participation by parts would make the ideas divisible by
parts. It would also make us say that we can predicate
"part" of an idea of a thing. Such notions are strictly
speaking unintelligible. Ideas, which are not material
things, are not materially divisible. But neither are they
conceptually divisible. A simple idea cannot be conceptually divided. As it has no parts, part of it cannot be
predicated of a thing. A complex idea, so divided, would
become a different idea. Here, the notion of the idea as
maintaining its self-identity by virtue of its unity
precludes all division. If, however, we say that the whole
of the idea is participated in, we still cannot maintain
the necessary oneness of the idea. If individuals participate in the whole of the idea, then, according to
Parrnenides, "one and the same thing will exist as a whole
at the same time in many different individuals and
therefore will be in a state of separation from itself' (Ibid.,
131 b). Self-separation seems the opposite of self-identity
when we understand this latter as the quality of being
one. To be as a whole in many is to be many rather than
being one.
As is obvious, at the basis of Parmenides' dialectic
is the ambiguity of the meaning of being one. There is
being one in the sense that an idea or concept is one;
there is also being one in the sense that an individual
thing is one. If, with Plato, we understand participation
in terms of a single notion of being, one common to both
the thing and the idea, then we are faced with the problem of trying to put together these two different ways of
being one. This, of course, is the famous problem of the
universals. It is: How can the idea or species be present
in the individuals, or how can the single individuals share
in the unity of the species? The endless debate on the
question is actually about the notion of being. Both sides
agree that the very being of to be is being one, but disagree on what this last means. If to be means to be one
thing, then the ideas, which only have conceptual unity,
are not. They are nothing but "common names" produced
by habit, circles of association, historical processes- the
list is endless. An illegitimate child who is not owned up
puts everybody under the suspicion of parentage. If we
reverse this and say that to be means to be a conceptual
unity, then the same fate befalls individual things. What
a thing is, its form or common nature, is what is. In itself,
in its own individual unity, the thing is not. Both solutions are obviously one-sided. For just as our senses convince us that there are individual things, so without conceptual unities we would have no specifically human mental life.
The debate points out a problem, but it does not per
se give a solution. When, in the Middle Ages, a solution
does arise, it occurs by virtue of a transformation of the
ontological status of the idea. The context of this solution is set by Aristotle. More specifically, it is set by his
denial that ideas or essences exist in themselves as opposed to being either in the mind or in objects (see
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Metaphysics, 991 b, 1-3, 1039 a, 24 ff.). For his medieval
followers, this denial of the self-subsistent idea or essence
does not solve the problem of the universals. The denial
leaves intact the two notions of being on which the problem revolves. The facts of predication show this. What
is predicated is the idea in the mind. Viewed in terms
of the activity of predication, the idea has the characteristic of universality. As engaged in the individual
object, however, the idea has the characteristic of
singularity. Thus, we do not predicate the "humanity"
of Socrates or Plato. The "humanity" of Socrates is part
of his individuality. It is an informing form that makes
him into a definite individual- i.e., into what Aristotle
calls a "primary substance." We do, however, predicate
the idea of humanity, which is present in our mind, of
both Socrates and Plato. It has the characteristic of
universality; that is, the character of one thing being applicable to many. How is this possible? How do we
recognize that the ·humanity of a sensibly perceived
singular is the same as the intellect's universal idea of
humanity?
his is the question Avicenna, and eleventh century Persian philosopher, asked himself. His
answer is that such recognition is possible only
by abstracting the idea or essence from both forms of
being one. The unity of a universal and the unity of an
individual must both be seen as accidental to the essence
considered in itself. Without such an understanding,
predication is impossible. Let us quote Avicenna on the
essence "animal":
T
'Animal' is the same thing whether it be sensible or a
concept in the mind. In itself, it is neither universal nor
singular. If it were in itself universal so that animality
were universal from the bare fact of being animality, the
consequence would be that no animal would be a
singular, but every animal would be a universal. If,
however, animal qua animal were singular, it would be
impossible for there to be more than one singular,
namely the very singular to which animality belongs,
and it would be impossible for any other singular to be
an animal (Logica, Venice, 1508, III, fol. 12 r, col. 1).
Avicenna is here arguing that we cannot explain predication by identifying the essence either with the universality of the concept or the singularity of the thing.
Predication requires both the thing and the concept, and
they must be brought together through an essence that
is recognizably present in each. If this is the case, then
Avicenna's conclusion apparently follows. It is that we
conceive something "accidental" to animality when
beyond its bare content we think of it as singular or
universal (see Ibid., see also Avicenna, Metaphysica, Venice,
1508, V, fol. 86 v, cols. 1-2).
Avicenna's position is in some sense a return to Plato;
but it is a return that transforms Platds original conception. Plato has Parmenides ask: "In the first place, I think,
43
�Socrates, that you, or anyone else who maintains the existence of absolute essences, will admit that they cannot
exist in us?" To which Socrates replies: "No, for then they
would not be absolute" (Parmenides, 133 c, trans. Jowett).
Now, it seems to be part of the logic :of the notions that
make up Platds thought they they are incapable of being absorbed in incompatible philosophical systems. They
have, in other words, a certain resistance to their being
misunderstood. This resistance is evident here. Attempting to follow Aristotle, Avicenna begins with the position that essences are either in the mind or in things.
But then he examines predication, and the logic of the
notion of an essence compels him to say that essences
cannot be identified either with being in the mind or being in things. In themselves, absolutely considered, they
are, as Avicenna shows in the passage quoted above, in
neither. Yet the very way in which Avicenna affirms this
exhibits the transformation he has wrought on Platds
essence. It is a transformation of the criterion of being
which underlies Plato's notion of participation.
The problem with this criterion in Avicenna's eyes
is its equation of being and being one. How can we
understand oneness with respect to the ideas? How can
an idea or essence be-that is, be one-in many individuals, each of which is also called one? Avicenna's
answer is to split the category of being by asserting that
to be does not necessarily mean to be one. Let us restate
this. If asked how the idea can be one and yet, being one,
be in each of the many individuals, Avicenna would reply
that it is precisely because unity is accidental to the being
of an idea that its being in the many does not prejudice
the idea's own inherent being. To make the idea one is
to make it present either in the mind or in things. It is
to make it either an idea in the mind which is predicable
of many or an individual which is a subject of predica·
tion but not itself predicable of another. Both forms of
being one are accidental to it as it is in itself. In itself,
it represents a form of being which is other than
predicable notion or physical object. Itself neither, it has
the possibility of being either. In other words, from the
point of view of mental notion or physical thing, it is just
this possibility of being either and nothing more. Its on·
tological status is simply that of a possibility.
The transformation that Avicenna has worked on
Platds original position can be indicated by noting the
following. For Plato, participation is based on a single
notion of being. As a consequence, participation in an
idea is also participation in being. For Avicenna, this is
not the case. The essence, insofar as it lacks unity, has
not the same being which an individual entity has. Thus,
participation in an essence does not mean participation
in actuality. How could it if the essence, instead of being supremely actual, represents only a possibility? In
fact, for Avicenna, the function of sharing being is taken
over by God, the only necessary being. Things cannot
become actual by participating in their essence, since
essence has, for Avicenna, no inherent status of actuality.
We need a further step to come to the modern no-
44
tion of an essence or idea. Once again it can be looked
upon -at least in a superficial way-as an attempt to
return to Plato. This return attempts to restore to the
essence some notion of unity.
hile Avicenna's influence was spreading through
the Arab world, the Latin West was independently developing a doctrine of the
transcendent properties of being. These are the properties of being irrespective of where it is found. There are
a number of these properties, but we need only mention one: unity. The doctrine taught that being and unity
are co-extensive properties. Where being is present, unity
is present. To the point that being is lacking, there is a
corresponding lack of unity. 2 When Avicenna entered the
West with his assertion that an essence had being but
not unity, only two alternatives seemed possible to those
who thought being and unity were co-extensive. They
could accept Avicenna's denial of the unity of an essence,
but reject his teaching on the proper being of an essence.
Alternately, they could accept his assertion that an essence
has a proper being, and reject his doctrine that unity
does not apply to essence as such. 3 The first course was
followed by Aquinas who writes that essence, considered
in itself, abstracts from "any being whatsoever" (De Ente
et Essentia, cap. 3, ed. cit., p. 26). In other words, lacking unity, it must, in itself, lack being. This is part of
what Aquinas means when he writes that essence and
being are "really distinct!' The famous defense of this
distinction is the treatise, On Being and Essence.
The second course was taken by Scotus. Scotus agrees
with Avicenna that essences have a proper being. He thus
argues against Aquinas's attempt to conceive of essence
apart from being (see Opus Oxoniense, lib. IV, d. 11, q.
3, n. 46, Vives ed., Paris, 1891-5). He also asserts that
essences do have a unity- not the unity of a mental idea
or a physical thing- but something slightly less than this
called minor unity. 4 This unity corresponds to Avicenna's
being of an essence. Such unity is demanded by the fact
that the essence in the individual perceived through sensation and the essence in the mind's universal notion is,
in fact, one and the same essence.
How does Scotus know that it is the same essence?
The answer can be drawn from the elements of Scotus's
position. The first of these is that essence in itself does
not express reality, this last being understood as a mental idea or extramental thing. It expresses only the
possibility of a reality. Its ontological status- i.e., the
status of its being- is that of a possibility (See Op. Ox.,
ed. cit., lib. I, d. 2, q. 1, n. 56). The second is that the
examination of this possibility is the examination of the
essences's "minor unity;" This means, for Scotus, the terms
which make up the definition of an essence must not be
contradictory. They must be compatible, that is, be
capable offorming a unity. The insight here is that without this capability, the essence defined by these terms cannot be instantiated as a unity either in the mind or in
W
SPRING 1984
�things. It cannot be so instantiated in the mind, for as
Scotus observes, contradictories cannot be thought of as
single notions (see Op. Ox., lib. I, d 2, q. 1 in Duns Scotus,
Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Wolter, London, 1963, p. 73).
This applies to analytical contradictions such as "p and
not-p:' It also applies to synthetic contradictions such as
the concept of a red tone. In such a case, the notions
are so "distant" from each other that neither determines
the other. If we leave the notion of figure out of account,
color and tonality can only be thought of as separate,
unrelated notions. The same criteria of compatibility apply to instantiation in things. To say "this one" in the sensible world implies that there is a subject of predication
there. It presupposes that the predicates we express are
unifiable in this subject. Otherwise, there would not be
one but two subjects of predication there.
A further element in Scotus's positiOn is that we never
leave the field of being when we talk about an essence.
There is a being of an essence; in fact, there is an existence of an essence. Essences themselves are only
possibles; but as Lychetus, Scotus's authorized commentator, remarks: "It is simply contradictory for any essence
to have its being of a possible and not to have its existence
of a being of a possible" (Op. Ox., ed. Vives, lib. II, d.
3, q. 1, n. 7). In other words, since essences have being,
they also have existence. For Scotus, this means that
degrees of existence follow upon degrees of essence (see
Op. Ox., ed. Vives, lib. II, d. 3, q. 3, n. 1). We can illustrate this by an example: the person of Socrates. We
start out with the most general essence we can think of,
that of thinghood or substance. We now begin to specify
this essence, idding successively the predicates, living,
animal, two-legged, rational, capable of laughter, in
Athens, engaged in dialectic, snub-nosed, etc. The
essence, as it is further specified, gradually narrows and
makes more definite its unity. The possibility corresponding to its unity becomes more defined. The possibility
of a rational animal living in Athens is not the possibility ofthinghood in general. Now, the ultimate determination is, of course, one of singularity, in this case, the
numerical singularity of an individual thing. When we reach
it, then according to Scotus, we have an existence corresponding to this grade of determination. We have the
actual existence of an individual man. This view can be
summed up by saying that all individual existents are
completely full essences. They are specified down to the
here and now of their being. Let us make a comparison.
If we say that such essential determinations must take
account of every element of a person's life and, in this,
also his relations to all other actual existents, we shall
be able to see the monads of Leibniz peeping over Scotus's
shoulder. Such monads also owe their actual existence
to the fullness of their essence (see Discourse an Metaphysics,
XIII).
H
ere, it would be helpful to mention Scotus's proof
for existence of God. It involves a redefinition
of Anselm's formula for God. In Scotus's ver-
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sion, it runs: "God is that without contradition than which
a greater cannot be conceived without contradition" (Duns
Scotus, Phil. Wr., ed. cit., p. 73). The addition of the words,
"without contradition;' points to the fact that Scotus's attention is on the essence of God. Since essences are
possibles, to demonstrate an essence is to demonstrate
a possibility. But, as we said, the basis of essential
possibility is minor unity. This is the same as the absence
of self-contradition. Thus, according to Scotus, what one
has to first demonstrate is that the essence of God '!wn
cantradicit entitatt!....._ i.e., "does not contradict entityness."
This phrase is typical for Scotus. Less literally translated,
it means "does not contradict that which every entity must
be in order to be." This, for Scotus, is being compatible
with self. Every entity must have compatible attributes
if it is to be. Thus, the major part of Scotus's argumentation is directed towards showing that God, as Christians conceive him -as causally active, as intelligent, as
willing, as infinite and perfect, but especially as the first
or highest- is, in fact, a compatible essence. This means,
for example, demonstrating that the notion of causality
is compatible with that of a first cause. It means
demonstrating that the notion of perfection is compatible with the notion of a highest or first degree of perfec- .
tion (see Duns Scotus, Phil. Wr., ed. cit., pp. 39-45, 48-9).
All of these demonstrations, if we grant them, prove
that God is possible as an essence. But what about the
proof that he is an actual existent, that he is a numerical
singular? To demonstrate this, we have to establish that
he is unique. This is because the grade of actual existence
corresponds to that of an essence specified down to the
uniqueness and singularity of an actual individual. To
manage this step of the proof, Scotus points out that the
notion of a first in the order of causality-as well as in
the orders of perfection, will, intelligence, and so forthcan only involve the same unique singular. The notion
of two firsts, as he argues, is simply contradictory. It is,
for example, contradictory to conceive of more than one
being which, at first, is defined as the necessary and sufficient cause of the world's existence. If there were more
than one, neither cause, by itself, would be a sufficient
cause. The result of such arguments is the assertion that
if God is possible, he must necessarily be an actual existent. This follows because God's notion specifies in the
order of possibility a unique singular. His essence includes his actual existence, for it is an essence which is
only possible as that of unique existent.
There are a number of ways Scotus makes this point.
For example, he notes that a first cause is essentially possible only as an actual existent. It is, he argues contradictory to the notion of a first cause of existence, to receive
its actual existence from some other cause. Thus, if it
is, indeed, possible for a first cause to exist, it must actually exist of itself. The possibility of its existence, however, has already been demonstrated by Scotus's arguments showing that the essence of a unique first cause
is a compatible essence. As a consequence, we must say
that a first cause does, indeed, actually exist of itself. It
45
�is an actually existent entity (see Duns Scotus, Phil. Wr.,
ed. cit., p. 46). A similar argument, is made about God
as the measure of perfectiOn.
Whatever else we might think about this proof, we
should keep an essential point in mind. It only works
for God. In other words, since nothing else is first,
nothing else can be proved to be unique and, therefore,
actual by this method. We can express this by saying that
God is a deductive singular. From this notion as a first,
we deduce he can only be as an actual singular. All other
beings, like our example of Socrates, are singular
inductively. They are' singular by the inductive addition
of conceptual formal note to conceptual formal note, each
further conceptual determination working to further
specify the essence in question.
What happens when we say that such "notes" or
specific differences are infmite in number, that they comprehend the specification of the relations of our finite
being to every other finite being? If we believe this, then
Leibniz's God is capable of seeing in our essence the
necessity of our actual existence. But we, with our limited
understandings, are not. In other words, for us, every actual existent other than God is, in terms of its conceptual essence, essentially unprovable. The conclusion
follows from our adoption of Scotus's metaphysics. The
result of this metaphysics is ultimately to collapse being
and essence together. In Scotus's words, "It is simply false
that being is other than essence" (Op. Ox., ed. Vives, lib.
IV, d. 11, q. 3, n. 46). Granting this, the proof of a being is also the proof of an essence. Thus, if we say that
a finite being has an infinite number of specifying differences in its essence, then a proof of its actual being,
as based on the examination of its essence, is a proof
necessarily involving this infinity. It requires the
demonstration of the compatibility of an infinite number of formal notes. Such a demonstration is impossible
for a finite mind. What we are saying, then, is that in
terms of our limited, human conceptions of individual
beings, we never cross the boundary between possibility
and actuality. This is because we can never inductively
specify an entity down to this one thing, to an actually
existing unique singular. We mention this to point out
the transformation which Scotus has worked on the
original Parmenidean equation between conceivability
and actual being, vo&iv and dvat. The equation no
longer involves, as it did for Plato, the identification of
a limited number of underlying, self-identical elements.
v
L
et us now return to Descartes. In his Meditations)
Decartes doubts the world and then finds it necessary first to prove God in order to assure himself
of the existence, say, of his ink pot. Why begin with God
rather than the inkpot? The procedure is in some sense
intelligible if we take into account the philosophical world
into which Descartes was hom. As a number of historians
46
have pointed out, the decisive influence in this world was
ultimately that of Scotus. 5 The influence of Scotus can
be seen by comparing Descartes' proof for the existence
of God with Scotus's original. The former is actually a
truncated version of the latter. The reason why Descartes
must begin with God's existence is, thus, at least
historically clear. In the order of demonstration, God's
existence comes first, since it is, in fact, the only existence
which we can in this tradition demonstrate.
What about Cartesian doubt? There are, as we maintained at the beginning, two sides to this doubt: doubt
of perception and doubt of opinion. Both, we claim, can
be traced to the transformation in the ontological status
of the idea.
Let us consider, first, the value Descartes places on
opinion. As indicated above, the transformation implies
that every essential predication we can make about the
world only grasps its objects under the aspect of possibility. In other words, the subject of our discourse, insofar as our discourse is concerned, is only a possibility.
It is an essence which we can only incompletely specify.
For all our talk, in terms of our statements' essential content, the object we are talking about may or may not actually be. The implication is that our statements, considered in themselves, express what may be called mere
opinion. By this, we mean that they have no inherent
claim to be "true" or "right:' Because of this, their examination is not, as Plato thought, a necessary first step
for philosophical enquiry. Since they are, in their essential content, inherently capable of expressing an actual
reality, they must, as Descartes believes, be, one and all,
doubted.
What about a direct perception of the object? Plato,
as we said, associates the realm of the directly perceivable with the attitude of trust. Trust, as opposed to certitude, is all that we can have if we remain on the level
of direct (or sensuous) perception. On this level, we cannot confirm a perception except through a further perception, and so we have ultimately to trust our perceptions. Between this trust and the Cartesian doubt of
perception, there also lies the change in the status of the
idea. The idea, for Plato, is etymologically and philosophically tied to perception. The Platonic term for the
idea, ei8o<;, is taken from sicSm, which means '(to
perceive!' The philosophical link between the two appears
when we take the ideas we garner from our perceptions
of the world as the highest expressions of actuality. If we
take the ideas as supremely actual, we are inclined to
trust rather than to doubt our perceptions; for then we
say that our ideas are and that their images, the directly
perceivable things, also are. The relation here is that of
actuality to image as given by the divided line. For Plato,
given that the ideas are, the directly perceivable thingswhich, as images, are dependent on the ideas- must also
be.
This philosophical position is, of course, completely
undermined once we say that the ideas have the ontological status of possibilities, i.e., that they express the
SPRING 1984
�fact that what sensibly instantiates them may or may not
be. At this point, they cannot provide a philosophical basis
for a belief in the existence of sensible things. Trust, therefore, turns to doubt, and like Descar:tes we must turn
to the benevolence of God to assure us of the world we
once took for granted. A sign of the new character of
this doubt is the fact that this benevolence itself becomes
an object of proof rather than a matter of direct perception. In the absence of any proof to the contrary, it is,
for Descartes, possible that God may be an evil, deceiving genius. Here we may remark that the direct experience of God's benevolence is grace. That grace could
be considered a matter of demonstration is the surest sign
that the modern age has been entered. 6
Was this transition to modernity necessary? Was it
necessary for us, with Descartes, to enter an age in which
we attempt to demonstrate matters which we formerly
took on trust or faith? Given that the whole of the history
we have recounted turns on the failure to distinguish being and essence, we cannot say this. What we can say
is that the question of being, of that which, as Parmenides
says, "is and cannot not-be;' still remains open.
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Footnotes
1. Both translations are given in 77le Presocratic Philosophers, trans. and
ed., G. S. Kirk and]. E. Raven, Cambridge, England, 1966, p.
269. The first takes the infinitives voetv and d:vm as infinitives
of purpose.
2. This is the doctrine of the Book concerning Unity by the 12 c.
philosopher and translator, Gundissalinus. See Die dem Boethius
folschlich zugeschriebene Abhandlung des Dominicus Gudissalinus De unitate,
ed. P. Correns, MUnster i. W., 1891, p. 3.
3. See Joseph Owens, "Common Nature: A Point of Comparison
Between Thomistic and Scotistic Metaphysics;' Mediaeval Studies,
XIX (1957), 4.
4. See Owens, pp. 8-9.
5. As Gilson points out, Scotus influenced Descartes, not directly,
but through Suarez's work, the Metaphysicae Disputationes. See
Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd cd., Toronto, 1952,
pp. 106, 109.
6. By way of contrast, we may observe that for Aquinas grace is emphatically not a matter of demonstration. See the Summa Theologica,
I-II, q. 112, a.5.
47
�Looking Together in Athens:
The Dionysian Tragedy and Festival
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
L
ooking at The Bacchae, we do not see all that
Euripides once meant to show, for the text is
incomplete. How is it that, just as we come
to the most terrible parts, after Agave has ex-
hibited the dismembered corpse of her son
and invited the Chorus to eat of the feast, how is it that
just here so much of the text is lost to us? Scholars
speculate about torn manuscripts and they scour ancient
citations, hoping to recover missing lines. Editors labor
to piece together sections from a twelfth century play called Christus Patiens, parts of which are cribbed from The
Bacchae. But we who read the play, or watch it in the
theatre, realize, as we approach the end, that we can
hardly bear to look, hardly bear to hear. What The Bacchae shows is obscene; what it says is unspeakable. Nevertheless, we feel compelled to see what it shows, to say
what it means.
This essay is a suggestion about a kind of poetic
justice. Might the mangled corpse have resulted in a
mangled text because, once the situation in which it was
originally confronted was gone, there was no way to face
such things? Dionysus may be unapproachable outside
the Athenian theatre of Dionysus, and perhaps such spectacles should not be watched except in circumstances like
those for which they were intended. The restored text
has been brought to life in the theatre. Modern
technology broadcasts the Greek drama to our living
rooms and flies us to Athens in attempts to reproduce
the original context. But viewed alone at home, or
watched in the company of strangers, the play must have
A tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Mcra Flaumenhaft has
published articles about Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Homer. An
earlier version of this essay was delivered as a formal lecture in Annapolis on September 23, 1983.
48
an effect thoroughly different from the one it had in an
Athenian festival two thousand years ago.
The Bacchae, like other Greek tragedies, is about,
among other things, looking together. While raising questions about Dionysus and the ordered, everyday life he
disrupts, the play suggests further questions about the
place oflooking in civilized human life. How do human
beings look at the world around them, at each other, and
at themselves? Are there things that should never be
looked upon, or should be viewed only in certain circumstances? Do rulers and ruled look differently when
public policy is determined in different regimes? Is the
looking of spectators in a theatre related by nature to
Dionysus; and is a festival like the one which once surrounded the play essential to the proper effect of such
looking? Let us look together, first at Euripides' depiction of Dionysus in Thebes, and then at the festival which
celebrated Dionysus in Athens.
PART ONE:
The Dionysian Tragedy at Thebes
acchus abolishes boundaries. This god shows up
oblivious to the lines and limits which define
ordinary human life. "Having changed his form"
(morphen d'ameipsas) (4) from divine to human, he is
simultaneously god and beast, male and female, terrible and gentle. The geographical sweep of the Prologue
depicts his disregard for natural and conventional distinctions alike. Transcending mountains, rivers, and great
seas, he has moved over a hugh diverse continent and
made it one. Different races, languages, and even walled
fortresses present no barriers. The coming resembles an
itinerary for an army advancing from the east, but
Dionysus' advent is an easy flow. The liquid sounds (lipon
B
SPRING 1984
�de Lydon) (13) indicate the ease with which he has come.
Embraced by the already "mingled" (migasin) (18) Greeks
and barbarians in Asia Minor, he returns to the "streams
of Dirce and the waters of Ismenus-." His sudden appearances are not through doors or gates or passageways.
Liquid himself, he slips in.
For those touched by Dionysus, life ceases to be
measured, articulated experience in place and time. The
women who follow him are merely ''Asians." "Having
passed from" (ameipsasa) (66) their origins, they forget their
former distinct lives in their single-minded devotion to
Bromius. They exhort others to follow them, to be
"displaced" (ektopos) (69). The stung Theban women
resisted at first but, now, they too are "all mingled
together" (anamemeigmenai) (37). They have left enclosed
houses in a walled city to dwell on 'unroofed" rocks on
the open mountains. There the distinctions between
human beings and the world around them are muted.
The Bacchantes are not separated from the earth by walls,
floors, and shoes. They've exchanged their shuttle sticks
. for thyrsus sticks, and now weave with ivy vines and living snakes. They are compared to birds, colts, and fawns;
instead of woven cloth they wear animal skins. Their fire
is not an instrument of art or domination. It is not used
for cooking, for forging tools, or for warmth against the
snows of Cithaeron. Nor does it harm them. Rather, it
flows from their rods, like lightning, a visible charge from
the god who electrifies them. They throw themselves to
the earth and sweet liquids spring up- not in rivers,
springs, or wells, but wherever the earth is touched. The
god's bounty is so great that even storage containers are
unnecessary. When Bacchantes dance, the whole mountain ''bacchizes with'' (sunebacheu) (726) them. But this
mountain is not properly their "place:' They speak of
Crete, and yearn for Cypris, Paphos, and Pieria, as well.
Furthermore, their holy places are peculiar in that their
sense of the holy precludes place as it is ordinarily experienced by human beings. As a proseletyzing cult, Bacchism aims at universality. The god could be anywhere,
anywhere one is not confined by the constrictions and
constructions of civilized life. He'll move on when he's
done with Thebes. To worship Bacchus is to be in
touch-with earth, air, fire, water- but not with any particular place. He promises a literal u-topia: no house,
no city, no defined home on earth. The Theban counterparts of these uprooted women tear up trees by the roots.
The women who worship Bacchus "out of place" also
live outside articulated human time. Neither natural nor
conventional time punctuates their lives; they do not plan
or wait. Unconcerned with time of year, they tend no
crops or animals, and store no food or wine for the future.
Their plants are ivy, bryony, and fir, ever-greens whose
looks do not reflect seasonal cycles, but whose lavish
growth is a continual show of powerful life within. The
ivy and vines grow freely, ungoverned by a set form which
they must reach to be themselves. The Bacchantes live
apart from men, mingling without regard to age, and
their lives are unmarked by ceremonies of birth, growth,
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
or death. The fertility god of seasons makes his followers
barren. They leave their own infants and nurse young
animals. New devotees must be made in the streets of
the cities which generate them. The Bacchantes chant
the remembered story of Bacchus, but they have no story
of their own. They do not look back together upon their
own pasts or forward to their own futures. Once again,
being in touch makes them deeply out of touch as well.
Immersed in the present, they are at one moment fast
asleep on the ground and then fully awake and upright,
or, at one moment bloody from battle and immediately
after, clean and refreshed, with no memory even of re-.
cent experience. The ritual orgia ---!'works in service'~ of
this god require little time-consuming preparation. There
are no embroidered robes, no burnt offerings, no altar
or hearth, no statues, no organized feasts. In short, where
there is no ordinary sense of time, there can be no articulated festival time; where there are no days, there are
no holidays.
The Bacchic celebrants merge not only with the earth
and other living things around them, but with the god
himself. To revere Bacchus is to ''bacchize" (bakcheuo) or
to "bacchize oneself' (katabakchioomai). The verb does not
. take an accusative outside the subject. Instead of offering libations and food to a distant divinity, the followers
of Dionysus drink him and eat him raw, ignoring even
bodily boundaries to become one with him. Losing oneself in Dionysis is a reassertion of one's ties to the earth,
but, at the same time, it is an attempt to assimilate oneself
to the condition of the god. Dionysus needs no priest to
mediate between· himself and his followers, no prophet
to explain him: "the leader- exarchos- is Bromius" (140)
himself. Anyone at anytime can be in touch with the god.
hose who merge with the natural world and with
Dionysus do so while merging with others. It's
not surprising that the most willing followers of
Dionysus are women, who are, perhaps, by nature most
attached to and in touch with other human beings. To
"bacchize" is to "thiasize the soul" (thiaseuetai psychan) (75).
Like most Greek choruses, the women of the thiasos, the
Bacchic band, speak in the singular: "I rush'' (thoazo) (66)
and "I shall hymn" (hymneso) (72). But here the dramatic
convention acquires special meaning as they are made
one by their dress, slogans, and the dance. Individual
heartbeats merge in the drumbeat, and ecstatic music
moves them "outside themselves;' not to isolation, but to
thorough communion. Even Cadmus and Tiresias feel
it; they say they've forgotten they are old men. Feeling
the same things, they slip into the dual (194) and share
a line of iambic trimeter (189). They "clasp hands and
together make a pair" (xunapte kai xunorizou chera) (198);
in Greek, they ()oin the horizon." "Counting out no one"
(diarithmon dbuden) (209), the god "has made no distinctions" (ou gar dierech') (206). As we soon see, the priest
of Apollo and the founding father of Thebes never fully
lose themselves in Dionysus. But the maenads on the
mountain are thoroughly merged. In a vase painting
T
49
�Dionysus faces two women, but it i~ difficult to tell which
of the four bare feet and arms beJong to which. The
thiasos distinguishes itself from hostile outsiders; left
alone, it is a unit. The Messenger mentions three groups
and the individuals around whom they gather, but the
women don't attend much to the division. Within the
thiasos there is no opposition or competition, in deed or
in speech. Once again, articulation iS foreign to Dionysus.
In contrast, the cattlebreeders and shepherds distinguish
themselves from each other, as well as from an easytalking city-slicker, and from the mute domestic animals
whom they again distinguish as young and mature heifers
(737,739). Like most messengers in the tragedies, the
Messenger from Cithaeron has looked with others. He
speaks in the first person plural, reporting that the herders
argued about what they saw: they "matched common
reports with each other in strife" (715). But the Theban
rnaenads, like the Asian chorus, cried out "in one voice;'
literally, "with one mouth" (athroo stomati) (725). Later as
they attacked Pentheus, "all gave voice at once" (en de pas 1
homou boe) (1131). The homogeneous democracy of the
Bacchantes merges into an impetuous "throng:' Ochlos
(117, 1058, 1130) is a word often used in political contexts to describe a fickle mob, female or male, as opposed
to the aemos, male citizens who assemble to discuss their
own and the city's common business. Though the women
sing antiphonal chants of some sort, there are no "winged,
words among the Bacchantes. In Homer the word ameibO
is used for exchange between persons, exchange of speech
or private possessions -like the self-conscious talk and
trade between Diomedes and Glaucus in Iliad VI. In The
Bacchae it refers mostly to change of position or appearance. It signals not organized giving and receiving
among separate individuals, but the fluidity of anything
touched by Dionysus.
The communion of the thiasos precludes private as
well as public relations. Ordinarily, human love begins
in distinguishing the loved one from others. Later, lovers
or friends rightly feel that they have become "one:' Nevertheless, in love and friendship, the others like oneself also
remain somehow other. The Bacchantes mention loveEros or Aphrodite- only as symbols of peace and release.
Since they make no distinctions within the communion,
they do not recognize either permissible or desirable
behavior in its separate members. Their gentle closeness
is thus deficient love, just as their angry violence can only
be primitive justice. Unlike friends, they look neither at
nor with each other, and feel no profound admiration,
pity, or fear for other human beings; they are too much
in touch.
Finally, placeness, timeless, merging Bacchism is opposed to the human self-consciousness which develops
from standing up and looking at the world, for Dionysus
makes it very difficult to look. The maenads are characterized by constant motion, interrupted by falls to the
earth. Euripides repeatedly calls our attention to the way
in which the god confounds "up and down" (anO te kai
kato), 1 turning the world topsy-turvy, and transforming
50
the relation of vision to the other senses. In the Parodos
the women sing of their feet, hands, mouths, and hair.
Those who feel themselves to have come alive through
Dionysus evoke the contact senses: the feel of air, smell
of smoke, taste of liquids, and sound of drums. In a later
ode they sing of the "pale-bare foot" dancing in the "green
pleasures of a meadow" (863-67). The synaesthetic mingling of visual and tactile expresses wonderfully the
powerful beauty of their undifferentiating awe. Similarly,
when they sing of colors in the Parodos, the effect is
kaleidoscopic. For them, color permeates, is diffuse; it
does not define the contours or limits of things. They
prefer night and shadows to light and clear lines. A vase
painting depicts a dancing maenad with head thrown
back and eyes open, but glazed over. Others shut their
eyes. The dancer's freely moving body extends and crosses
the defmed vertical space he usually occupies. 2 Ordinarily,
eyes see only when they are lifted on an upright body,
away from the earth, and when they remain still long
enough to gaze steadily. Through them, an autonomous
individual takes in what is outside himself. But the Bacchantes "take in" the world in order to merge with it. By
changing the relative status of the senses, Dionysus makes
the world look different.
The Bacchae odes have been compared to Romantic
nature poetry or to landscape painting. But the Bacchic
attitude is very different from that of the poet who looks
at himself looking at the natural world. This looking requires separation from as well as kinship with, the ivy,
snakes, fawns, and foals which twine, slither, and leap
through a world with no horizon, a world in which they
have not stood up. Wordsworth's poems are about mortality, time, memory, place, and his own changing
perspective on nature and human life. He is a mature
self-conscious beholder who often looks with or addresses
his observations to another. And he speculates about his
kinship with and his distance from the world upon which
he looks:
For I have learned
to look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity ... (Tintem Abbey)
Immersed in the beauty of the land, the Bacchantes have
never seen a landscape. The latter, as the word suggests,
must be "shaped" by the seer-or painter-who frames
the scene with boundaries and a horizon. When a Bac-
chic woman throws down the frame of her upright loom
(istos), she abandons all frames and the orientation which
framing makes possible in human life.
One reason The Bacchae is so unsettling is that the
Chorus, which in most Greek plays is tied to the city,
here consists of unrelated foreigners; there is no community "point of view?' Agave thinks she has seen and
killed a lion (1175, 1238), and, with eyes rolling in her
head, she calls upon her son to come look. (1257). Instead of withdrawing in pity and fear, the women, for
SPRING 1984
�once, are eager to look: "I see and shall accept you as
a fellow reveller" (1172). Their response to her invitation
to eat expresses their revulsion, but they urge her to show
her trophies to the citizens. The rest of the play is Theban
business and the Chorus hardly reactli to the dissolution
of the city through which they have passed, but with
which they have never looked. Agave finally comes to a
standstill, away from her thiasos. Only then can Cadmus make her see that this is not a happy "spectacle" (opsin) (1232), that, indeed, it is "not the sort of thing to be
seeri' (oud'hoion t'idein) (1244). Dionysus affects human vision not only by preventing and distorting it, but by making those he touches unable to distinguish between what
should and should not be beheld.
entheus rejects the god. He speaks the language of
opposition, not surprising in the grandson of
Cadmus, who emerged from the barbarians to
overcome a monstrous dragon, and reaped civilized
Hellenes from these chthonic, even incestuous beginnings. Pentheus has detached himself from these beginnings. He makes distinctions; between old gods and new,
immortals and mortals, Greeks and foreigners, free men
and slaves, men and women, Thebes and countryside,
day and night, dignity and folly. He orders out the articulated divisions (781-83) of his male army against the
female thyrsus bearers who mingle on the mountain. Pentheus trusts in gates and walls, jails and chains. Like his
grandfather, he has a strong sense of his own. He must
defend "my" mother, "our" women- the Greek does not
require the possessive- against alien forces. He will not
be touched: "Do not put your hands on me, do not wipe
off folly on me" (343-344), he cries. When the two old
men who have clasped hands urge him to recognize the
levelling god, Pentheus draws the line. But although he
is so different from the Bacchantes, he too is characterized
by his disordered vision. In both his public and private
behavior, he is unable to look with other human beings.
King Pentheus is alarmed for the safety of his city.
Most monarchs are vigilant about erotic alliances within
their regimes, for the private friendships of those who
see alike may result in invisible conspiracies against a
king. There are no such friendships in Thebes and, as
we have seen, the thiasos is characterized by an undiscriminating, blind form of "friendship:' Though the
maenads are unlikely to oppose the ruler in any political
way, the presence of a communion of citizens who no
longer feel their primary tie to be the city does constitute
a real threat to ordered political life. But King Pentheus
deals with this threat tyrannically. Without father, mother,
or friends, he looks and acts alone. The maenads are too
much in touch to look with others; Pentheus, like most
tryants, is too out of touch. His grandfather has abdicated to him, and there is no council of advisors. He alone
will spy out and act against opposition. Even the feeble
chorus of elders which provides a sort of public perspective in some plays is absent here. And anyone- even
P
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a professional seer-who offers another point of view is
suppressed.
Pentheus' public behavior is tyrannical in another
way. Most kings rule by their manifest presence, often
through public ceremonies or processions in which the
ruler exhibits himself to his subjects, or in which they
are reviewed by him. 3 Even without planned ceremonial
occasions, the well-being of the community requires the
visible presence of its different elements. Ruler and subjects might not look together as equals, but each is a
viewer recognized by the other. Pentheus rejects mutual
viewing just as he rejects mutual council: only he is to
be on view; the city will look to him for its well-being;
opposition must be hidden away in dark dungeons. He
scorns even to look upon those who disagree (252).
Not surprisingly, the vision of the friendless tyrant
is defective. His view of the women is based on what he's
heard. "I hear (kluo), he begins a long distorting description of their imagined behavior (216ff). He "knows" of
Tmolus by "hearsay" ( 462), and mistakes a bull for the
odd-looking Stranger who makes him want to hear more
about the maenads. The eyewitness report of the
Messenger from Cithaeron, in the central scene of the
central episode of the play, looks both back to Pentheus'
hearsay envisionings and forward to his disastrous firsthand view of the Maenads. "Having seen the sacred Bacchantes" (664), he says that Pentheus too would have seen
(737, 740) that the thiasos was a "wonder of good order
to see" (693). "Having seen these things;' Pentheus "would
have come with prayers" (712-13). Then he describes the
attack on the villagers. In a striking image he reminds
us of the way in which human eyes almost reflexively close
to avoid seeing what should not be exposed to view: the
garments of [bulls'] flesh were drawn apart more quickly
than you could close the lids over your royal eyes"
(7 46-4 7). The Messenger continued to watch this Dionysian dismemberment. The "terror" ( deinon), he says, was
a "sight to see" (theam'idein) (760).
From now on, Pentheus' concern shifts from his
public responsibility to his private needs. For, suppress
him as he will, Pentheus too yearns for Dionysus. No
longer satisfied with reports, he develops a great "desire"
(eros) (813) to see the maenads with his own eyes (811),
to become a "watcher" (theates) (829). He says he would
be sorry to see them drunk, but Dionysus remarks that,
all the same, he would see these "bitter things" with
pleasure (815). To look differently, Pentheus must look
different. He dons the "costume" (stoiC) (828) of a maenad
but, unlike the women, he is painfully self-conscious. His
posturing betrays the armour between himself and the
"effeminate form" (gynaikomorphe) (855) he has assumed;
it is both shared costume and protective disguise. He says
he has been "playing the Bacchant" (bakchiazon) (931). The
verb differs slightly from the one used by the Chorus
(bakcheuo); it suggests the difference between engaging
in one's own activity, and watching oneself assume the
customs of others. Pentheus' carefully delineated world
has begun to blur. Hallucinating, he sees two suns and
51
�a double Thebes. The Stranger, who at first seemed "not
unshapely" (amorphos) (453), now appears in other shapes.
The transformed king is led off in a peculiar private "procession" (pompe) of unacknowledged retainers who later
report what happened, and by the Stranger, "the leader
of our viewing (theoria) (104 7).
Unlike the maenads who fall to the earth, Pentheus
rises far above it, an isolated "spy" (kataskopos) (916, 156,
981) and a "spectator" (theates) (829) of the absorbed
women below. Once again, his looking is aberrant. Pentheus is a voyeur. In the private realm he wishes not to
do, but to view, everything. The sexual voyeur watches
actions which, by nature, should not concern anyone but
the actors. By ignoring the line between private and
public, he obliterates both realms. Other voyeurs who
stare unblinkingly at the corpses of the dead, or the grief
of the living, also see what in civilized life must be
obscene, off-stage. The voyeur may seek out spectacles
of bestiality, incest, necrophilia, cannibalism, and other
violations of the natural lines of human life. Pentheus
surely is titillated by the suggestion of such things among
the maenads. In collapsing the distinctions between
private and public, seen and obscene, human and animal,
the voyeur may appear to embrace Dionysus. But the
embrace is false. Although the Bacchantes, like animals,
do not properly look with others, they do look- in their
fashion- in the presence of others. As we have seen, the
voyeur lacks their unselfconscious innocence. His furtiveness reveals a deliberately violated sense of shame
which they do not have; he knows he should not be looking. We call him "bestial;' suggesting not nature, but
degeneration.
The voyeur's vicarious embrace of Dionysus is false
also because, though somehow moved by what he sees,
he is an isolate, outside communal, as well as private,
combinations. Pentheus wants to see -"the things he should
not see" (912), but his looking must be seen by no one;
he must not be touched. Even as he ignores boundaries,
he erects a frame around others like himself, reducing
their actions and passions to material for his viewing.
Pentheus' private spying, like his public violence, is tyrannicaJ4 Earlier, he speaks only of the maenads' physical
behavior; now too, he can see only what their bodies are
doing. He cannot share their spiritual joys or sorrows
or "thiasize the soul" with others; at the end he feels only
the "pain:' or ''grief' (penthos), of Pentheus. In a terrifying reversal, this solitary and too-distant onlooker is
drawn swiftly into the scene. Seen by those who do not
ordinarily look up, he is pulled down to the earth he
denies in himself. Earlier he anticipates being held by
his mother; now he reaches out to touch her cheek and
is ripped apart, his ribs "laid bare" (gymnounto) (1134) like
those of the animals the Messenger describes. The corpse,
dismembered and unburied, will be displayed for all to
see. The young man who would maintain distinctions
is almost eaten, reabsorbed, by his own mother, in a terrifying violation of human time and relations. His city
is shattered; its founder will be transformed into a snake
52
and will lead a mingled barbarian horde against the
Hellenes he once civilized. Exiled by Dionysus, he will
return to "ravage the oracle of Loxias:' that is, of Apollo
(1336).
Apollds priest had warned Pentheus to join him in
recognizing the new god. But like the god he already
serves, Tiresias remains somehow aloof, always looking
from afar. His rationalized arguments on behalf of
Dionysus seem alien to the spirit of the god of umnediated
mergings. He is a Theban, yet he has the distance to look
into Theban affairs and see more than those whose
primary allegiance is to the city. Like the Bacchantes,
he is in touch with a god; but he is somehow out of touch
with other human beings; unmarried and childless, he
has been male and female; he has looked upon copulating
snakes, and once he beheld the goddess Athena naked,
as she bathed. Unlike the followers of Dionysus, he
transcends the city in isolation. His blindness, though
related to his insight and foresight, precludes his looking together with others. He alone is not punished, but
it is clear that, Apollonian vision, as well as the looking
of shameless Bacchantes, and voyeur-king, is inadequate
when Dionysus shows himself in Thebes.'
PART TWO:
Tragedy and the City Dionysia at Athem
magine now another city, one which tries to provide
an entire community with something like the experience of those who lose themselves in Dionysus.
We are all familiar with revels which sanction temporary
release from daily life: medieval Festivals of Misrule,
Twelfth Night, Jewish Purim, Catholic Mardi Gras, and
camp topsy-turvy days. These are characterized by reversals or blurring of political and sexual hierarchies and
distinctions, by unusual masks and costumes or no
clothing at all, by dramatic role-playing, by wild dancing, or by the conspicuous consumption of intoxicating
beverages. The most important of the Athenian festivals
was called the City Dionysia. The name differentiates
it from rural festivals by attaching it to the physical city,
astu; the location is crucial. This festival was far more
than temporary entertainment; it was an important part
of the positive training of the Athenian people. 6 Let us
delay considering the dramatic highpoint of the festival
and speculate about how the arrangements which led up
to it address the unsettling questions The Bacchae raises
about Dionysus, looking, and the city. We shall also consider some modern counterparts.
Like other civic events, this annual festival is
characterized by its attention to shared time and place.
In late March summer agriculture and war do not demand the full attention of the citizens. The seas are
navigable again, and allies send ambassadors to bear
tribute and also to look at the first city. In the spring,
I
SPRING 1984
�the citizens are constantly aware of the distinctions between themselves and outsiders, as w~ll as between themselves and resident aliens and slaves 1within the city. As
we shall see, the community which assembles to celebrate
the god who obliterates boundaries' is conspicuously
divided into distinct groups throughout the festival.
As in most civic business in Athens, responsibility
and preparations are shared. Though inefficient, this arrangement insures continual participation in public life.
Like other projects whose parts are contributed piecemeal
by private citizens who order and pay for them, the
festival involves large numbers of people. Several months
before, the Archon Eponymous and his aids, none of
whom is required to have any special training in drama,
choose the poets who will enter the competitions. Actors
are assigned and a preliminary selection of judges is made
from among the tribes. The ten names of these ordinary
citizens-not drama critics-are put into sealed urns in
the Acropolis; tampering with them is a capital crime.
Also chosen long before the festival are the choregoi,
private citizens who provide the money to outfit and train
dithyrambic and dramatic choruses and flute players.
This duty is called a leitourgia, a work on behalf of the
leitos, or folk. Unlike the Bacchic orgia, the leitourgia is the
civic duty of an individual, freely assumed, or assigned,
by tribe or city. Other "liturgies" equip a warship or
finance a delegation to a pan-hellenic festival. This great
public giving allows an individual to exhibit his wealth,
but to do so in partnership with the city, which pays the
actors and endows poets' prizes. A liberal choregos spends
gladly; though compulsory, the leitourgia is not a tax. His
giving, like all noble action in a small homogeneous community, is meant to be seen. During the festival, the
choregos exhibits not only his chorus, but himself, dressed
in splendid robes, as a noble object for the contemplation of his fellow citizens. This office seems to speak to
Rousseau's warning in The Social Contract, against the
substitution of money for public service. In fulfilling his
civic responsibilities, the choregos offers, in Rousseau's
terms, both his "pocketbook and his person"; 7 he expends
himself. Compare him with modern "philanthropists;~
an interesting word -who, in their own way, often
privately, and even anonymously, endow museums, parks,
and theatres of their own choosing. At another extreme,
a manual for producers of community dramas warns
against a single patron because even fmancial dependence
on one person reduces the community, group, effort. a
The modern representative republic often seems either
to put all the responsibility into private hands, or to fear
private initiative. The ancient participatory democracy
requires the wealthy citizen to spend his wealth honorably,
and then displays him and his work as examples of civic
liberality- even magnificence- befitting a free man
among equals. 9
The Proagon, before the poets' contest (agon), takes
place one or two days before the festival. Here the public
is officially given the details of the program. In the
Odeum, a hall near the theatre, each poet stands with
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
his choregos, actors, flute players, and chorus, to announce the titles, and perhaps plot summaries, of the
plays. The civic meaning of the Proagon is clearer when
compared with our practices. It is not a review by an
outsider who discusses and perhaps recommends the play.
Nor is it a coming attraction in which potential spectators are enticed by samples; there will be only one performance. Rather, it is an occasion for the many citizens
who will be acting to display themselves in their own persons, as fellow citizens, to those who will be watching.
In the Proagon, no one wears masks or theatrical
costumes.
The last event before the festival period is the torchlit night procession commemorating the coming of
Dionysus to Athens. The god's image, removed earlier
from the temple in the theatre precinct, is carried back
from the northwest Eleutherae road to the theatre. The
procession is the first properly "Dionysian" event but it
differs strikingly from the various manifestations of the
god in The Bacchae. Here again we see how the City
Dionysia links orgia with leitourgia. Instead of lightning
appearances and the removal of the population to the
mountain, here a manmade statue of the god is deliberately carried within city walls, through gates and streets,
and placed in a building made for institutional worship.
It is escorted by armed epheboi, young men in training
to defend the city, but who are not yet full members. Like
the festival period, they are on the border between civic
and non-civic time. In The Republic, Socrates would forbid them to watch plays and would restrict their "spectacles" to the noble warfare of their elders. 10 In his Letter
to D'Alembert, Rousseau suggests that they attend community dances instead of the theatre. 11 Athens requires
the young men to be present at the theatre festival, but
carefully regulates their role.
The next day begins the period during which all ordinary business is suspended. There is no assembly during the festival, and no legal action may be taken.] ailed
prisoners are released on bail. The first official event, a
turbulent procession, the pompe; is not an occasion for
careful looking and distinguishing. Pressed together, or
even from the sidelines or a reviewing stand, one forms
not a view of the whole, but a fragmented, kaleidoscopic
impression. Though it is difficult to gaze steadily, one
is intensely aware of moving bodies, of arms, bellies,
noses, backsides, and ritual phalluses. 1 2 Citizens and
foreigners, old and young, men and women move to the
same throbbing rhythm. Many wear masks, and perhaps
costumes, which blend their identities with those of the
opposite sex or the god they celebrate. The arrangements
do, however, maintain some shape, some direction. Now
the physical forms of the city, which may have blurred
in the flickering torchlight the night before, are visible.
The procession winds through the streets, halting in the
agora, perhaps for choral dances at the altars of other
gods. The epheboi sacrifice a bull and present the choicest
parts to prominent city officials. Unlike the mingled Bacchantes of all ages, only unmarried girls take part in the
53
�pompe. A maiden of noble birth leads, carrying a golden
basket of offerings. Others bear wine, now mixed with
water, and food, now cooked with \fire, to be consumed
on the way. The abundance of Dionysus in Athens is en-
closed in pots, baskets, wineskins, lind other manmade
containers. The rich ride in chariots. Prepared costumes
identify other groups: citizens in white, metics in red,
and choregoi in their finery. However immersed in the
crowd they are, the celebrants enter the theatre of
Dionysus together, in public procession, as citizens of
Athens. They are one, but the one is an articulated community, not a thiasos.
The theatron-watching place-where the entire city
will spend the next few days, from dawn to dusk, is a
round space like both a natural dell, and a conventional
agora or an enclosure within a city wall. Most sit closely,
knee to knee, with nothing between them. Jean-Louis
Barrault remarks on the warmth and unity of "houses"
where there is only one armrest between seats:
The spectator is part of the others ... the audience is
a sort of synthesis of the whole community of the world,
of the promiscuity of all the others pressing one against
the other; a sort of human stirring shoulder to shoulder
... which releases ... a monstrous god, a sole personality.... The audience is a kind of enormous baby ...
all the adults lose their personality. 13
his might recall the Bacchantes. But it does not
describe with sufficient subtlety the Athenian
theatre, or the way in which "the monstrous god"
comes there. The congregation includes the free male
citizens, the Assembly, who often gather in a similar amphitheatre on a nearby hill; the festival gathering is not
the first time they form a community. They are uniformly
encouraged to attend- Pericles arranged for the city to
provide tickets for all- but they are not mingled indiscriminately. And, while they are joined on this occasion by many resident aliens and foreign visitors, the aim
is not a "synthesis of the ... world:' Rather, grown men,
epheboi, maybe women and children, metics, and
visitors, sit in separate sections, identifiable in their
colored robes. Citizens may sit by tribe. It is the city of
Athens that is foremost, and not the unarticulated "world."
It has been conjectured that the wooden bleachers, which
were later replaced with stone ones, were made from the
timbers of Persian ships that these men, or their fathers,
defeated at Salamis a few years before.1 4 Whatever the
facts, it is important to remember the occasions on which
they gathered together in the past.
Finally, there is another kind of seating~'front row"
stone thrones for polis officials, generals, and choregoi.
Unlike Bacchantes who sit close together and look at
nothing, or Pentheus, who sits alone and spies on
everything, these "distinguished" citizens sit together and
apart, viewing and on view. Most prominent, at the
center, sits the priest of Dionysus, city official and intermediary between the god and his celebrants. Gone
is the exarchos who whips up the moblike thiasos to
T
54
ecstatic identification with Dionysus. A statue of the god
who always looked alone in Thebes, now joins Athens
as a fellow spectator at his own festival.
Dionysus is present in his altar as well. The flame
which burns in the orchestra throughout the festival is
neither the useful fire with which men master nature,
nor the narthex fire which streams spontaneously from
the wands of dancing Bacchantes. The altar fire is for
looking at, 15 not by solitary individuals or private households, but by the whole city together.
The visual focus of the theatre is the round dancing
place (orchestra) of the chorus and the platform (skene)
where the actors perform. This platform usually
represents the outside of a palace. There is no drop curtain to separate audience from ·acting place. Unlike
modern theatregoers whom an implied "fourth wall" putS
in the position of voyeurs looking into a private place,
Athenian spectators, like the dramatic characters, observe
what is normally on view to the public.
But while attention is focused on the stage, it is not
exclusively so. The performance takes place in the
daytime, so the acting area is not a lit place in a dark
space. Daylight preserves distinction which break down
in the dark. Changing as the day passes, it keeps those
who concentrate on artificial stage time in touch with
natural time. Since the theatre is so large, the figures
on stage are small, distant, and undetailed. The well-lit
audience which sits almost circularly around them, is thus
as much to be seen as the performers on stage. A citizen
in the theatre of Dionysus is far more aware of himself
and his fellow spectators than are modern theatre or
movie goers, strangers who are absorbed by the illuminated action at one end of a dark rectangular room.
Television, which enables viewers to watch in common,
but in private, all the time, with no preparation or
cooperation before the viewing, seems the complete antithesis of the civic viewing we are considering. The
modern extended republic does its governing through
representatives, now also mostly seen at a distance, on
television. It is not surprising that those who stay home
to view Thanksgiving parades organized by private businesses will view anything else that is shown. Electronic
inventions have the potential to turn millions of viewers
into voyeurs, who see without being seen, and keep in
touch only by looking from afar. This technology may
produce extreme unity and homogeneity, but at the same
time, extreme isolation. Such isolation was less possible
in the Athenian arrangements for overseeing public policy
and viewing dramatic performances in full view of one's
fellow citizens.
Two more views are shared by the spectators in the
theatre. One is of the mountains surrounding the city.
Scenic shots in film versions of Greek tragedies are
beautiful, but tend to remind most of us that we are
foreigners. The landscape beheld by the Athenians is their
own. The second view is of what they have built upon
the land. Though they are outdoors, in touch with the
weather and the natural contour of the hill they sit on,
SPRING 1984
�they can still, as Pericles tells another congregation of
Athenians and strangers, feast their eyes on Athens. The
unsettling wonders they will behold in the plays are
framed by the solid citizens and solid foundations of the
city which makes the festival.
·
The Bacchae, these singers are native-born men and boys,
present and future citizens. They are released from their
required military training to be trained for the festival.
Their trainer, though not 'a, poet, must also be native to
the city. As worshippers of the god, they sing and dance,
bound into a circle, crowned with flowers and ivy, but
B
efore turning to performances, let us glance briefly
at some of our contemporary American festivals.
In the context of our present discussion, they have
a decidedly unci vic look. Popular theatre festivals sell tickets
long distance, mostly to non-residents, and import
famous actors who perform for audiences that have never
before assembled and never will again. They gather at
various Stratfords, for example, to "see shows." Our
diverse and tolerant republic is rich in the variety oflocal
ethnic festivals which are celebrated traditionally, often
with the help of quite different friends and neighbors.
But, in America, these festivities cannot be civic festivities,
and it is evident that in a prosperous, mobile, and cos-
mopolitan society such traditions tend to atrophy. National holidays like Thanksgiving, Independence Day,
and presidents' birthdays do not seem to have the same
intensity as local or ethnic celebrations. Another variety of contemporary festival self-consciously aims to bring
together a diverse urban community. A recent Chicago-
fest was run by a non-local business called "Festivals Incorporated." It offered food, crafts, entertainment, and
publicity for the incumbent mayor, but deteriorated into
racial wrangling. In Annapolis, a national beer company
underwrites an annual city festival heavily attended by
outsiders. It is advertised in the Washington Post among
other area {(Festivals, Festivals, and more Festivals;' from
which a private family might choose a spring outing.
Most of the pleasant fairs and festivals in hundreds of
American towns have a commercial basis; their most visible activity, amidst preparations, decorations, and enter-
they are unmasked. Far from losing their identities, they
remain distinguishable from each other and identifiable
by their fellow citizens. Nor are the spectators moved outside themselves by these hymns, since the singers are not
fictional personages with whom they identify. 16
The next day begins with a political display in which
the city exhibits itself for its own citizens and for outsiders. After the priest of Dionysus purifies the theatre
by sacrificing a pig and pouring libations, there are processions which, unlike the earlier parades, are entirely
for watching. Young Athenians march before the vast
assembly, carrying jars of silver talents, the year's tribute
from allied cities. Citizens and strangers are honored for
their services to Athens. The orphaned, but now grown,
sons of men who died in battle parade in full armour.
They have been educated by the city, which now displays
them, as they make the transition from wardship and
seat themselves, as fellow spectators, among the citizens.
Now at last is the gathered city prepared to look upon
what is alien, alien not only because the dramas depict
semi-divine heroes, and kings, and assertive women of
other cities at other times, but because, in them, civil-
ized people must confront anew what they have made
alien to themselves: their own buried monstrousness. The
great chorus in Anti'gone articulates a paradox about man:
the very thing that makes this anthropos wonderful makes
him terrible. To be deinos is to be tragic. Human beings
are articulating beings who rise up and distinguish
themselves from the world and from other beings in the
world. Only man is conscious of place, time, and mor-
tainment, is exchange of merchandise; the crafts displayed
for looking are for sale, as is the food.
tality, and only man distinguishes between what he will
do and look upon from what is forbidden. But tragedy
Our hunger for something more than commercial
fairs has taken an interesting form in the past few yearsfood, crafts and entertainment in a setting of medieval
and Renaissance exotica. For example, at Columbia,
Maryland, a "planned community" with a heterogeneous
population which works in other cities, a corporation
started in Minnesota hosts a "Renaissance Festival" to
reminds us that man is also the only being who essentially strives to ignore or overcome such limits. Like
voyeurs' peep-shows and everyone's dreams, 17 the
tragedies reveal rape, parricide, incest, cannibalism, defiled corpses; their subject is human hubris, the violation
celebrate another place at another time. The Washing-
and impure.
oflimits and the failure to articulate. In the theatre spectators must face what is mixed and mingled, mangled
ton Post ad announces that, "the sixteenth century is back
by popular demand!' Of course, the sixteenth century
fair was also primarily a commercial enterprise. Our
celebration of such things must be very different from
Little Italy's saints' feasts, and even more so from Athens'
Dionysia. Examples abound to demonstrate the differences between the festivals of cosmopolitan modernity
and those of the ancient polis. Let us now return to the
theatre in Athens.
In the first watched performances, choruses from each
tribe sing dithyrambic hymns, often about Dionysus. But
unlike the identically masked, rootless Asian women in
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
o understand the theatre of Dionysus in Athens
one might have to understand why Oedipus ends
his life in Athens. Repeatedly, the plays show us
a tragic protagonist from Thebes- or some place like
it- who brings his terrible and wonderful experiences
to the most civilized city in Hellas. Athens is not simply
providing a refuge for them. These extraordinary suf-
T
ferers are somehow gifts to insure the fertile, vital
humanity of the city that takes them in. Consider Thebes,
the paradigm tragic city. Cadmus comes from the east,
brings the alphabet, slays a dragon, and turns a violent,
55
�chthonic, incestuous settlement into a walled and orderly
city. Then Dionysus is engendered·there and, when he
1
returns, the women run for the mo untain. The young
king is killed and the city is shattered. After a few generations, another watchful king exposes a baby on the mountain to avoid predicted disasters. The baby, who grows
into a fully developed version of Pentheus, returns to subdue the raw-eating sphinx-monster that has attached itself
to this city. Answering all questions and requests himself,
standing above the earth and the city, taunting the gods,
this autonomous paradigm of all human beings kills his
father, sleeps with his mother, and generates his own siblings. Years later the blind, dependent untouchable comes
to Athens, to a sacred grove containing the threshold to
the underworld. Adopted by the city whose ways he must
now feel out, and recognizing the power of love, he now
gives not his power to dominate or control, but himself.
Theseus recognizes that to accept him is to worship
simultaneously (hama) the earth and the sky. It is not clear
whether Oedipus vanishes up or down, but at last he
leaves something which will pass down properly through
generations of Athenians. Thebes, the city of violent
beginnings, of vines and wines, of dragons, snakes, and
sphinxes, of maimed walkers on earth, and of the wild
mountain, has come home to Athens, the city of peaceful
beginnings, of the rooted olive tree, of skilled horsemen,
and the tamed sea. Athens is deepened by this presence."
The plays, then, are emissaries between the community and what it must usually exclude. Like Oedipus,
the tragic drama is a necessary pollutant, "terrible to see,
terrible to hear" (deinos men horan, deinos de kluein) ( Oed.
Col. 140-41). Like Oedipus, it is also a blessing to civilized
human beings, to reconcile them with their primitive,
yet ever present, origins- with the buried dragon's teeth.
But these deina, terrible things, are now "most terrible
to men, yet most gentle" ( deinotatos anthrOpoisi d'epiOtatos)
(861). Dionysus on the mountain makes one forget the
bitter things; in the theatre, he recalls them, so that
remembering and looking are sweeter than forgetting and
turning away.
Athens understood that to be fully human, deinos
anthropos must recognize both static, pure Apollo, and
dancing, drunken Dionysus- and to come to "see" in the
ways of both gods. Officially sanctioned Dionysian
festivals, and the arrangement by which the Delphic
shrine was given over to Dionysus for several months of
each year, both bear witness to this understanding. But
like Tiresias' arguments, other festivals -and even the
sharing at Delphi- fail to recognize Pionysus fully. The
difficulty is that they are all from the point of view of
Apollo. One measures off part of the year, contains it
within strict boundaries, and permits a weak version of
once powerful devotions. Meden agan-='nothing in excess':_we hear Apollo say; metron ariston-='measure is
best"- even as the revellers toss their heads and drink their
wine. The wisdom which says one must know oneself,
and that both Apollo and Dionysus are that self, is an
Apollonian wisdom. One temporarily forgets oneself,
56
under orders from the god of clarity, articulation, and
the distant view. The difficulty lies in the serial character
of these arrangements, the alternation of distance a~d participation, vision and touch. Pentheus' acting and looking are not Euripides' images of the theatrical experience.
For true actors and spectators experience simultaneously
both Dionysus and Apollo, just as Theseus worshiped
earth and sky hama, "at the same time."
The actor undoubtedly "identifies" with the alien
character he impersonates. But, behind his mask, he retains his self-conscious awareness of who he is. In the
Proagon he showed his own face; in the drama he shows
the mask of Pentheus or Dionysus. The mask may call
into question our fixed identities, may suggest Dionysian flux. But, we do not see one person transforming
his very face into that of another.
The Chorus is also simultaneously foreign and
familiar. In The Bacchae fifteen male citizens impersonate
the Asian women. They sing of wild, timeless, placeless
running, while executing dances which require the utmost attention to time, place, and direction. Though they
speak as one and wear the same mask, they move in rectangular formations, always aware of rank. They sing
of open spaces in the shadows and contact with the earth,
but dance in an enclosed space, in broad daylight, on
a hardened orchestra floor. They sing of experiences
which obviate speech in complex diction and matched
stanza?. They have committed to memory hymns to
amnesia.
The spectators, who behold the action on the stage,
are also simultaneously themselves and others. Only as
separate, autonomous souls can they feel pity and fear
for others like themselves, but clearly other. As democratic
equals, citizens-friends, they look both at and with each
other. And like friends who act for and see themselves
in each other, they see themselves in those they watch
on stage. Unlike the cave spectators in the Republic, they
are not in the dark; they can turn their heads. They are
aware, even as they feel the real joys and terrors of
Dionysus, that they watch a framed imitation, a whole
with carefully articulated parts. Looking together, they can
face what, if experienced firsthand or seen privately,
might destroy their humanity. The "spectacle" (apsis), contest, and actors, which Aristotle and some of his interpreters dismiss as unnecessary, allow for facing such
things with others. Essential to the moral and civic ends
of tragedy, they are the proper work of legislators,
teachers, and citizens, as well as of the costume maker. 19
et us' pause again to consider some recent American theatre "experiments;' of interest to us because
they so often invoked Dionysus, while differing
radically from the theatre which celebrated him in
Athens. The "new" theatre of the 60's took its cues from
Cezanne and Cubists; it sought kaleidoscopic, collage effects unbound by frame or linear, articulated forms.
Often looking to eastern models, it was self-consciously
"total;' multi-media, not just visual. The followers of
L
SPRING 1984
�Artaud and his "theatre of cruelty" agreed that Sophocles
is too "fixed;' that the theatre must move away from looking, language, and "masterpieces?~zo Athens brought
Dionysus from the mountains through the streets, into
the theatre. Some "new" groups took their performances
"to the streets'~ to Times Equare and Grand Central
Station- in order to dissolve barriers between imitation
and "life?' Others abandoned the "fourth wall" convention and the distinction between watcher and watched,
encouraging audiences to mingle with "actors" and to take
part in the ('action." Distinctions between what is publicly or privately viewable lost their meaning in such spectacles; nakedness was a trademark of the "new" theatre.
The explicit goal was to create a democratic communion
among all participants, most of whom had never come
together before. Paradoxically, this communion was to
coexist with different reactions from different spectators.
Everyone could do and feel his own thing, but together.
Theoretically, any reaction was as good as any other in
this "democratization of Dionysus;'2 1 but the celebrants
themselves have described violent conflicts. The deliberate
avoidance of hierarchy and "rigidity" was the goal of such
groups as the Living Theatre, The Orgy-Mystery Theatre, The Any Place Theatre, The Ontological-Hysterical
Theatre, and the James Joyce Liquid Memorial Theatre.
The name of Dionysus was often heard, even before The
Performance Group produced its famous Dionysus in 69,
in which actors, spectators, speeches, and sets maintained
their "fluid" character from "performance" to "performance:' The published text, in which the triumph of
Dionysus is unequivocal, is based on Arrowsmith's
translation of The Bacchae. It includes the ruminations
of the director and members of "the Group;' and closeup
photographs of their writhing, blood-stained, naked
bodies. It is, appropriately, not paginated. 22
The so-called "people's" theatre thrived in the 60's during the most intense opposition to American "participation in the war in Vietnam." But the "participatory" antiwar "happeniog" rarely explored broad questions of policy
and conscience. It was often meant to substitute for, not
speculate on, political action. The Athenians participated
in the decision to fight the Persians, and those who sat
together in the assembly fought together at Salamis.
When they produced The Persians, however-and later
plays as well- they remained spectators, and their judges
were looking for universal "masterpieces!' What is the relation between ordinary aCtion in Athens and festival and
theatrical action during the Dionysia?
In their workaday world the Athenians look together
at the same things, from differing perspectives, in order
to reconcile private interests in domestic policy. From
a single shared perspective they must also look together
to formulate foreign policy for the whole city. This too
is self-interest. Hindsight, present-sight, and foresight are
for the sake of action. In their leisure time, in the theatre,
they feel and judge, but not from self-ioterest. These plays
are also civic actions, but they are not for the sake of
further political action. Like assembly, lawcourts, and
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
war, the festival unifies the citizens. The plays at the heart
of the festival also make them one, not from competing,
but from looking, together. Just as festival competition
is somehow higher than the competitive excellence of
Athens at work, so also is play watching superior to play
production, because, in addition to prizes, glory, and a
beautiful product, it has looking as its end. Pythagoras
said that some people attend games in order to sell for
gain, others to compete for fame, but that the best come
to see. 23 In the shared time of the festival, and especially
of the play, human beings cease trying to control the
world and others in it. They do not merely merge or
dissolve, but, for a time, they pause from working,·
building, and fighting, to recall their relations to the
earth, to other living things, to each other, and to the
gods. Duriog the festival of Dionysus, looking for the sake
of lookiog is joined with dancing for the sake of the dance;
looking here means staying in touch. The thoughts which
accompany such looking are likely to transcend particular
interests, and also distinctions between people who belong
to the city and others outside it. Thus, to this assembly,
Athens invites its resident aliens and foreigners to behold
both Athens and what Athens beholds. Many, no doubt,
are mere sight seers. But for some citizens and some
strangers, this dancing, looking, and feeling together may
approach a communion which far transcends that of the
city and that of the Dionysian communicants. Does this
kind of looking require others- or very many others? Do
philosophic friends require civic festival times to direct
their attention to the things which transcend time? The
few who emerge from the cave in The Republic appear to
be solitary spectators. Perhaps they might read tragedies
in private. But for most at least, the Athenian theatron
is somewhere between the thiasos and theoria, and it aims
at making them fuller human beings than they would
be without it.
aviog made such high claims for the tragic highpoint of the City Dionysia, I hesitate to bring us
back to earth. But we must return, if we are to
be true to the spirit of the festival. Back to the city would
be more accurate, since, as we have seen, the earth and
the city, though in touch, are not to be confused. The
exact order of the festival events is disputed, but nearly
all the schedules proposed agree that satyr plays and comedies follow tragedies. Either at the end of each day, or
at the end of the festival, the spectators turn to different
sorts ofDionysiac representations. It is impossible to explore them fully here, but we can at least note that both
differ from tragedies in that they depict unbounded appetites, distortions, and monstrosities as humorous supplements to regulated everyday life. They, like processions and carnival merrymaking, can coexist with that
life, without threatening to shatter it. The comedy after
the tragedy helps to return the partially transported spectators to full citizenship, even as it mocks them. Contemporary subjects, Athenian settings, topical and personal allusions, and unmasked addresses to the audience
H
57
�as citizens, repeatedly break the dramatic illusion. The
awarding of prizes, crowning of victors, and processions
out of the theatre, return them t~, ordinary time and
place. The Assembly is the core of their non-festival life
and the appropriate settiog for the formal transition back
into that life.
The first business transacted by the Assembly on the
day after the Great Dionysia is festival business. Now
only the citizens gather in the theatre to consider religious
matters and complaints about the processions, contests,
officials and participants in the festival. 24 Such selfconscious e-merging from festival to everyday time is
strikingly missing from the mergings which are central
to the Dionysian experiences we have examined in The
Bacchae. And it rarely occurs after conventional theatre
and television shows- contained gaps in ordinary timeor after anti-establishment performances which deliberately blur the margins of the action. The conclusion of
Mardi Gras in New Orleans provides a last example. A
reporter writes that at midnight a bullhorn abruptly announces that the holiday is over: " 'You must clear the
streets for the street cleaners' . . . by morning the natives
say, 'You'll never know it happened: "25 Mardi Gras takes
over the city for a day; but like most of the festivals
discussed above, it is not primarily a civic event. Exclusive
"crewes" organize parades, crownings, and balls, and there
is much general merrymaking, but the city does not
gather as one. 26 Rather, it provides police protection and
garbage disposal. The ends of the Great Dionysia and
of the Mardi Gras are a telling contrast of ancient and
modern notions of the ends of government.
In The Bacchae the god says he will manifest himself
"so that the city of Cadmus may see (horaz)" (61). But Cadmus and his people somehow cannot "see" Dionysus and
survive. The city of Athens arranges to look together
upon Dionysus and those who have beheld him, and at
the same time to look upon those with whom they are
beholding Dionysus. In this remarkable arrangement it
is possible, at least, that citizens may truly drink and
dance, yet look and learn, and yet again, return to their
looms and to their assembly on the day after.
We who live in a world where women no longer labor
at looms, and free men may never set foot in assemblies,
cannot return to the Athenian polis. Nor would most of
us want to, knowing that the coherent public life we have
been examining was accompanied by rigid sexual distinctions, by extreme censorship, by slavery, poverty, and
almost continual warfare. As we buy our machine-made
clothing and elect our representatives, as we feast together
after watching the parade in the comfortable privacy of
our homes, as we choose our plays and movies, and even
our festivals, we thank whatever god we will for our
physical, political, religious, and iotellectual freedom. But
we too have paid a price, a price having something to
do with Dionysus and with civic community. Perhaps we
can avoid becoming intellectual voyeurs who restore the
texts of unspeakable things, stage what should not be
58
seen, and examine with unblinking curiosity the cares
of a distant time and place, by keeping always one eye
upon ourselves, and by asking what our souls and cities
can learn from the ones at which we have been looking.
Notes:
1. Ba"ha" 80, 96, 349, 552, 602, 741, 753.
2. See Erwin Straus, "Forms of Spatiality'' in Phenomenological
Psychology. (New York, 1966). I have learned much from the essays
in this book.
3. One might think of the progresses of the first Queen Elizabeth,
or the coronation of her namesake. See Edward Shils and Michael
Young, "The Meaning of the Coronation;' Sociological Review) 1,
No. 2,1953.
4. We might also remember Gyges whose injustice and tyranny are
related to his voyeurism. In the Republic (II) Gyges~or his
ancestor -looks on an oversized naked corpse in a hollow horse.
The ring he steals from tQe body enables him to be present among
people who cannot see him, and to do unjust acts with impunity. He soon commits adultery with the king's wife and takes
over the rule. In Herodotus (!.8-13) the ruler of Lydia insists that
Gyges look upon his naked wife. After this viewing, Gyges kills
the husband and becomes ruler. Leontius is another solitary
viewer of dead bodies in The Republic (VI). Although his anger
and desire are at odds, it is not clear that intellect and desire
are. Injustice and voyeurism are also related in the Biblical story
of the lustful elders who watch Susanna as she bathes. Their looking, as much a violation as their rape would have been, is related
to their being corrupt judges, violators of community. Turning
their eyes from heaven, they bear false witness, and are finally
exposed because they could not properly look together with
Others.
5. I have found the following books most useful in thinking about
The Bacchae: G.S. Kirk's translation (Cambridge, 1979); E.R.
Dodds' Text, Introduction and Commentary (Oxford, 1960); R.P.
Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus (Cambridge, 1948);
Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington, 1965).
Charles Segal's comprehensive study, Dionysiac Poetics and
Euripides' "Bacchae"(Princeton, 1982) appeared as I was finishing
the present essay. I have elminated some, but probably not all,
of the overlapping material. Segal's book is indispensible reading ·
for anyone interested in The Bacchae and Greek tragedy. I too
have learned much from many of the authors he cites: Rene
Girard, Arnold van Genneps, and others.
6. I have found the following books most useful in thinking about
the festival and about Athens: Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (Oxford, 1961); H.W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians
(Cornell, 1977). AVV. Pickard-Cambridge, Ditlryramb) Tragedy and
Comedy (Oxford, 1927) and The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford, 1953). H.C. Baldry, The Greek Tragic Theatre (Norton, 1971)
is an easily available paperback introduction.
7. Jean:J acques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, III, xv.
8. George McCalmon and Christian Moe, Creating Histon'cal Drama:
A Guide for the Community and the Interested Individual (Carbondale,
Ill., 1965). p. 48.
9. Aristotle, Ethics, IV
10. Plato, Republic, VI.
11. Jean:Jacques Rousseau, Letter toM. D'Alembert on the Theatre, IX.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and his WOrld (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)
contains the best discussions I know of such periods of festival
abandon.
13. Jean-Louis Barrault, "Best and worst of professions," in The Uses
of Drama, ed. John Hodgson (London, 1972), p. 24.
14. E. O'Neill, Jr., "Note on Phrynichus' Phoenissae and Aeschylus'
Persae," Classical Philology 37 (1942), 425-27.
SPRING 1984
�15. One is reminded of the Jewish injunction about Hanukkah
candles: they are to have no utilitarian purpose, but to be only
for looking. There is conjecture that Hanukkah customs
developed deliberately in response to rur'al Dionysiac rituals: Jews
no longer need hide in the mountains like beasts, wild running
is replaced by standing around an altar; inarticulate shouts by
psalms of praise, and flowing torches by crafted candelabras. See
Theodore H. Gaster, Festivals of the Jewish Year (New York, 1966),
p. 252.
16. A thoughtful discussion of the civic status of the dithyramb can
be found in William Mullen's Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton,
1982). Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy consistently underemphasizes
the institutional and civic context of both dithyramb and tragedy.
17. What does the dreamer behold? Often timeless, placeless, topsyturvy, his dream is peopled with fluid personae who merge with
each other and their surroundings. It may resemble the shifting
life of the Bacchantes, who wake or sleep in an instant. Having
no memories or restrictions when awake, perhaps they sleep
without dreaming. The dreamer may experience what is unthinkable in wal<;ing life. Not only J ocasta has observed that, "in
dreams many a man has lain with his own mother." Like a play,
a dream is often watched; Homer's people "see" their dreams. The
dreamer may be a spectator of his own actions; he may be the
protagonist of the drama, or "play" all the characters. In such
dreams, the line between watcher and actor is blurred or even
disappears. Because a dream has no continuity of time or place
with waking life, and no frame or context in which it is "seen;'
the dreamer is usually thoroughly absorbed by it. But at the same
time, a mysterious "second sight" says it is im(y a dream:'
Dreamers who lose all awareness that they dream a contained
"imitation" really choke, or scream, or wake, when the dream
becomes too "real;' too traumatic. They might remind us of
theatre spectators who miscarry when they see the Furies, who
shoot the villain, or who run from the theatre in fear. There is
another sort of frame around the dream vision. Not prescribable,
reportable, or censurable, the sweet dreams and hideous
nightmares of civilized human beings are their own business.
We cannot dream together, and so dreams can have only the most
indirect, unpredictable influence upon the waking life of citizens
and city. Those legends in which men about to violate their
motherlands dream of violating their mothers suggest that our
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
dreams are not the realm in which to nurture viable community life. [For examples, see "Caesar" in Plutarch and Hippias
in Herodotus (VI. 107)] The waking tyrant does what other men
would only dream of doing. The dreams of good men may be better than those of ordinary ones, but no one can learn to be good
while asleep. Dreams, like voyeurism, offer a less disruptive form
of Bacchism, but they are still private, in Greek, 1'idiotic;'
experiences.
I believe that a similar story is to be found in Suppliants, Persians,
Oresteia, Philoctetes, and Medea.
Aristotle, Poetics, VI.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York, 1958).
Daniel Bell, "Sensibility in the 60's;' Commentary, June, 1971, 73.
The Performance Group, Dionysus in 69. Ed. Richard Schechner
(New York, 1970).
Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pythagoras. The present discussion raises
questions about the looking we do at "sports events?' Consider
the funeral games in Iliad XXIII, their more civic counterpart
in Aeneid V, the Panathe:qaea games in Athens, and the ancient
Olympic games.
The single most important source of information about the
festival assembly is Demosthenes' speech Against Meidias. In 349
B.C. Demosthenes served as choregos for his tribe's dithyrambs.
Harrassed by Meidias before the f~,stival, and publicly assaulted
by him in the theatre, Demosthenes won a preliminary motion
against him in the theatre assembly. The surviving speech was
never delivered-an out-of-court settlement was reached-but
it conveys vividly attitudes about the festival and its civic role.
Washington Post, February 25, 1982, B 1.
In 1968 a group of newcomers to New Orleans, concerned about
the aristocratic exclusivity of Mardi Gras, added an event in
which everyone might participate. The new "Crewe;' Bacchus,
founded a night parade for the Sunday before the holiday. Sunday was chosen, in part, because it was also prime television time.
Floats were designed by a professional, and the event received
nationwide coverage. The first king of Bacchus was not a local
citizen leader, but an imported Hollywood star, the jewish Danny
Kaye! See Myron Tassin, Bacchus (New Orleans, 1975). For the
more traditional celebrations, see Duforn Huber, If Ever I Cease
to Love (New Orleans, 1970).
59
�Left and Right
Jacob Klein
I.
The typescript bearing the above title was
found stuck in the German proofs of Mr. Klein's
book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra. It is published by permission of Mrs.
Klein. She thinks that she recalls hearing of Adolf
Mueller as a young friend who sought out Mr.
Klein for conversation in the "Romanische Cafe;'
a meeting place for intellectuals on the Kurfuerstendamm in Berlin. This rather early essay,
probably not intended for publication, is
somewhat uncharacteristic from the perspective
of later writings, both in its matter which is the
establishment of a political typology, and its style,
which employs the abstract language of impersonal entities. Translated by Eva Brann and Beale
Ruhm von Oppen.
For Ad. Mueller
November 1934
The following observations disregard all concrete
political situations, groupings and programs whatsoever.
They start with the assumption that there exist two, constantly antagonistic, human attitudes, perhaps at all
times, but in any case in the Western cultural sphere
within the temporal limits of its development, most
especially since the Renaissance. These may be termed
the "left" and the "right."
60
I
n all "left" endeavors two basic motives are always
to be distinguished which do, however, perhaps go
back to one root. The first is the insight into the
"misera conditio humana;' the misery of human
existence ~'misery" understood in every sense. The consciousness of this misery has always been present, as far
back as we can see. That it is better not to be born, is
a saying of Sophocles. The lamentations of] ob can never
be stilled. Christian consciousness has made these lamentations the basis of a universal exegesis of human existence. The sinful creatureliness of all creation is the
Christian interpretation of this constantly experienced
fact. 'lThe misery of the creature" which everyone must
feel who can feel at all, the vanity of every wilful attempt
to ignore it, the sense of compassion with all alien misery
as with one's own, the contempt for pride, for glory, for
power in which "compassion" and with it the deepest
sources of human life are, as it were, "forgotten'~ these
are all basic elements of every "left" position. In modern
times they are always conditioned by Christian consciousness, even if it is no longer at all understood as such.
To this first motive is joined a second: the feeling for
"naturalness" on the one hand and for the "artificial;' for
"imagination;' for the "unnatural" on the other. Human
life always moves within certain conventions, mores,
valuatiops. All these are something "artificial" as contrasted to the factual course of life with its desires, instincts, its happiness and unhappiness. "Bare" life appears
here as the overwhelming phenomenon; all limits and
norms which human beings erect appear not only as
useless, but as fundamentally reprehensible. This view
was already vital to the school of the Greek sophists, who
were first to develop the great opposition of physis and
nomos, of nature and convention. It is characteristic of
SPRING 1984
�this view that "natural" life admits of no valuation, that
it is simply not possible to maintain an affirmative or
rejecting attitude in the face of the 'fundamental fact of
natural existence. This view is also the root of all modern
science, which, according to its own' self-interpret<ition
is and must be "value-free." But since this view must
necessarily place itself in opposition to whatever the
prevailing "moral" estimations happen to be, it immediately acquires a polemical sense. It must attack all
the prevailing norms and values; it must attack whatever
is "artificial" and "according to convention": Thus it must
itself affirm and deny; it must itself value the "natural"
positively) condemn the "unnatural:' But thus this view
·is confronted with a question insoluble in its own terms,
namely how valuation is itself at all possible. The ordinary
answer to this question (which may, however, appear in
many guises) is the denial of the originality of valuation
in general and the reduction of every valuation to certain "natural" givens or situations. The scientific expression of this attitude is positivism.
For the left consciousness of the present, that is, of
the last three centuries, the fusion of these two motives
is characteristic. If we abstract from all the superficial
appearances of this left consciousness and imagine the
"ideal" case of a left human being (such as does indeed
occur in real life), we may describe him as follows: He
is dominated by the urge to be absolutely truthful, not
to fool himself or others, to attach no importaoce to the
external, to pay the highest respect to all feelings which
are "genuine;' that is, those which come from the depths
of natural and creaturely life, to sacrifice himself for
these.- But this kind of person fulfills his highest
possibilities only in confrontation with the "other" world.
His indignation against contrary conduct, against the
subjection of all that is kind, genuine and truly felt can
intensify so as to become- rebellion, and unconditional
rebellion at that. This rebellion aims at the restoration
of that condition in which alone life appears worth
living- from the perspective of the "natural." If this
rebellion turns to violence, this violence is understood
as the self-sacrifice of one's own nature. The few genuine
anarchists who have existed in the world represent this
type at its purest.
II.
W
ith respect to the attitudes of the "right" two
basic motives, which however do not by any
means need to go together, can be likewise
distinguished. The first motive has at least this in common with the corresponding left, that it acknowledges
the "misera conditio humana:' But here it is no longer
a matter of"sympathy" or "compassion" with the human
race. Starting from "misery" as an unchangeable and incontrovertible fact, "right" consciousness seeks to give the
human being an inner support. This support is based
on the necessity of"control" [Zucht] and "discipline;' and
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
this necessity is in turn based on divine law. All conservatism which does not rely internally on divine law is
self-delusion ( cf. the phenomenon of the Wilhelminian
conservatives). The basic principles which are the standard for this discipline are in each case already contained
in the factually given living tradition. But the continuation of the tradition must never undermine the forces
which are at work within it: Thus preservation of the
tradition does not mean mere resistance to the powers
which are hostile to the tradition (the phenomenon of
reaction); rather such preservation must always go back
to these original forces, must always honor the commandments which are the final justification of the will to preservation, must in this sense be absolutely righteous [gerecht].
Whether such a "right" attitude is possible or not does
not depend on the "self2will of the human beings whose
attitude it is. Such an attitude can therefore never become
the demand of a party program. A "conservative party"
is merely a phenomenon of reaction; there are only conservative forces, never conservative "programs." A socalled "party of the right" therefore succumbs to the "left"
under all circumstances.
The second motive for the formation of a "right" attitude is the striving for power. This motive too has an
assumption in common with the "left": here, too, the
"natural" is acknowledged as the last court of appeaL
However, the right makes a selection within the "natural"
which is not only opposed by "left" consciousness, but
which appears to it as simply unintelligible. So little does
the "left" take this attitude of the "right" seriously that
it must necessarily succumb to the right when things
become serious. There is a whole series of classical
witnesses to this attitude. The first is Callicles in Platds
Gorgias. Everything that Machiavelli or Nietzsche later
had to say on this theme is expressed by Callicles with
unsurpassable clarity. For this attitude the proper fulfillment of the human being lies in the (!;randeur" of human
life. This grandeur is, for the most part, connected with
"glory;' but glory is, as it were, only the external aspect
of inner grandeur. This grandeur may also mean the actual "mastering" [Beherrschen] of human beingsalthough this mastering may not always assume the form
of external rule [Herrschaft]. What is aimed at here, in
the face of all "misery;' is the human possibility of insisting on wanting-to-have-more [a reference to the verb
pleonektein often used in the Gorgias] despite all obstacles,
despite every weakness, despite all will to life. It is a fundamental error of all left theories to wish to derive this
wanting-to-have-more from more ('original" instincts, such
as the nutritive instinct, the sexual instinct and the striving for "gratification" of all kinds. Indeed, one might say
that the consciousness of the left is simply determined
by the fact that it not only condemns power and the striving for power but does not take them seriously. For left
consciousness, "those in power" are from the outset carricatures, as are also all the attributes of power. For the
attitude which is the "right" in this sense it is a question
of realizing "grandeur;' not only at the expense of all sorts
61
�of weakness, but also at the expeqse of any private or
public disadvantaging of any number of human beings,
no matter how great.
Up to tbe seventeenth century this possibility was
always present as a real possibility. It was taken into account. . . . The tyrant was not only a reprehensible individual but also a danger to be constantly expected. The
present situation is determined by the fact that tyrants
in this sense are simply no longer possible. Today rule
[HerrschaftJ is never exercised for its own sake: It must
')ustify" itself; it must be based on the interests of a class,
a nation, a race. This rule no longer understands itself
as "autocratic'' [selbstherrlich] but bases itself on demands
which arise out of specific "conditions." It is demagogic
not only for tactical reasons, but demagogy is for it an
inner necessity. Therefore it must perish.
The "left" and "right" types which have been described
are surely seldom met with in this purity. The present
day situation is in general marked by the fact that the
"typical" forms of human existence become "mixed" with
one another in an imperspicuous way. This has already
been mentioned in discussing the second type of "right"
consciousness. But it holds no less for all the "political"
endeavors, narrowly understood, of the present. Here
Marxism has sketched out a general scheme for determining the "true" tendencies of the historical development amidst the tangle of "convictions;' "world views"
or- in Marxist terms -!'ideologies." Starting from the
undeniably great preponderance of economic interests
in our world, it distinguishes two powers of politicaleconomic life: the one originates in "property" which
wants to hold on to itself under all circumstances, the
second comes from the more or less distinct consciousness
of the "propertyless'!_ the overwhelming majority of all
the people of the globe -who "have nothing to lose but
their chains:' The idea which was decisive for the development of this view is the idea of justice [Gerechtigkeit].
The conceptual means by which this view is articulated
all come out of the arsenal of "left" consciousness.
However neither of these is necessarily attuned to the
other.
A
ccording to its own consciousness Marxism is
based on positivistic science, although the impulse decisive to its formation had at first nothing
to do. with the latter. Brought up in the atmosphere of
Hegelian thought, Marx saw through the enormous tension which exists between this "thought" and the factual
"being" of the enormous majority of human beings. He
therefore undertook- though, characteristically, using the
means of the Hegelian system- to turn this thinking "upside down," and in order to be able to justify his procedure he began by understanding the Hegelian system .
in its already inverted form. The Hegelian system was
a doctrine of the "spirit." In its concept this spirit was
determined as being devoid of any immediate reference
to the world; just so the spirit had once been conceived
62
by Descartes. In the face of this spirit all "nature" collapsed into something unessential and indifferent. The
innocent blooming of plants and the eternal paths of the
heavenly bodies appear as something infinitely inferior,
compared even to the confusions of human consciousness,
compared even to evil. For what is here enmeshed in confusion is still "spirit!' The opposite pole of spirit in the
Hegelian system is "contingent" .. "matter." It is indeed
determined by nothing but the fact that it is the opposite
of spirit and to that extent "inactual." The inversion of
the Hegelian system was accomplished by Marx in the
sense that he took as his foundation not "spirit" but "matter!' Now Marx understood this matter not at all as the
last basic element of all "nature" (thus far he remained
completely Hegelian), but rather as the defining concept
[Inbegriff] of human life on earth. This Marxian concept of matter is thus completely ('anthropological," exactly
as is true for Feuerbach.* The whole Hegelian "left" is
in this sense anthropologically oriented: It sees the
"material" or "real" human being with all his desires,
instincts and entanglements in a battle with nature and all
her forces which oppose his will to life (wherein the left
is, to be sure, in agreement with the innermost tendencies of positivistic science). But now a gradual transformation of this basic view took place.] oined in battle with
the ruling norms of the state, the law, religion, the
Hegelian left found its obvious ally in positivistic science,
and the anthropological materialism, whose nucleus had
been for Marx the critique of economic conditions,
slipped by reinterpretation into a scientific materialism.
(Correspondingly, "dialectic" was more and more given
up in favor of "causal inquiry": Kautsky's mode was
typical.* Lately a school has arisen in Russia which attempts to distinguish economic materialism much more
strongly from natural science.- Its chief representative,
in no way sufficient, is Deborin* who has already been
excluded from the Party.- In tbis connection the recently
published writings of the young Marx are very important.) That was the basis on which the "scientific.
character" of socialism was understood. Indignation
against "injustice" was reduced to completely value-free
matters of fact. Such indignation was interpreted as
[merelyJ the mode in which the "necessary" development
toward socialism makes its break-through. Every possible assertion concerning the ultimate goals of human life
was referred to a "time to come;' because impossible under
present circumstances. The realistic goal of world revolution which must result from the antagonisms within the
system of production is, for the time being, the only con*[Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872, studied under Hegel, attacked
Christianity in favor of a ''humanistic theology." Karl Kautsky,
1854-1938, friend of Marx, a founder of the German Social
Democratic Party, leading defender of Marxist orthodoxy, first against
pragmatic reformism and then against the radical Leninist left.
Abram Deborin, 1881-1963, leading Soviet theoretician, lost his posts
under Stalin for "Menshevizing idealism," the separation of philosophy
from practice.]
SPRING 1984
�crete and actualizable goal. Only after its actualization,
in the "realm of freedom;' does genuine human history
begin.
In this transfer of the ultimate perSpective into "time
to come" appears the tension betwee_n the "left" theory
of Marxism and its practices, which cannot so simply
be labelled "left:' Everything depends on how the idea
of justice is going to be understood i!l tbe coming development of Marxism. The idea of justice stands beyond tbe
opposition of left and right. [It is] its relationship to the
idea of power which decides whether it is to be assigned
to the left or tbe right camp. If one abstracts from all
their other motives, the present "fascist" endeavors of all
kinds are fighting about this relationship. Every possible reflection about this relationship, whether it come
from the left or from the right, must seek to take its bearings from tbe place where it once received a fundamental
treatment which has never since been surpassed- Plato.
On the "Frame" of Platds Timaeus
Jacob Klein
The following fragment of a letter by Jacob
Klein was evidently addressed to Leo Strauss.
It was written toward the end of his first year at
St. John's College. It was probably a draft, and
there is no evidence that it was ever sent. It is
published with Mrs. Klein's permission.'
August 14, 1939
Dear Friend,
T
his time I would like to pass on to you some of
the results of my Timaean brain-rackings, not
only for your enjoyment, but also to gain a certain clarity for myself. As things stand, you are probably
the only human being who will believe me. I believe that
I have understood something about the "frame" of the
Timaeus, and that would naturally mean more than the
mere "frame."-The first question in a reading is this: what
is the point of having the Atlantis the story bifore Timaeus'
speech? As is well known, some super-subtle people have
wanted to transfer it to the beginning of the Critias. What
is striking about the Atlantis story is the emphasis on
the "ancient," the primeval. The speaker is Critias. According to the [dramatic] date, this Critias cannot, in-
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
deed, be the "tyrant'';2 he is differently characterized; he
is too old, and even taking into account all the indifference to "chronology'' within the texts of the dialogues,
the tyrant just doesn't fit into the affair. But naturally,
one can't leave it at that. Supposing it were not the tyrant
Critias, why [not] another Critias who (a) is the grandfather of the tyrant and (b) has himself in turn a grandfather called Critias? And then the first question: if he
develops the "program" [27 A- B] according to which
Socrates is to be regaled with his "guest gifts;' then he
should properly be assigned the second speech, but in fact
he anticipates the most important thing in his account
as the first speaker. And the Critias itself remains a fragment . . . . Naturally it is possible that it is a natural,
unintentional fragment; why not? But still, it isn't quite
convincing, the less so since the Timaeus and the Critias
are certainly not Platds very last works. Besides, the Hermocrates is missing, which seemed to have been firmly promised in the Critias [108 A-D] and which is, so to speak,
a necessary consequence of the "program" that Critias
develops in the Timaeus. Though it isn't quite apparent
from this "program" [Tim. 27 A-B] what Hermocrates
is to talk about.
On the previous day Critias, Timaeus, and Hermocrates had been the guests of Socrates. Today Socrates
is their guest. Yesterday yet a "fourth" was there: today
he is ''sick:~ Critias is, then, the grandfather of the "well-
63
�known" Critias (and has himself a further Critias as
grandfather). Timaeus is unknown- I mean "historically''- but in any case he is from lower Italy. Hermocrates
is very well known to the Athenians (and therefore to
us): he whipped them in Sicily-a capable general. Why
this combination?
The answer is: the three represent- Cronos, Zeus,
and Ares. "Yesterday:' when Socrates spoke about the
Polity, 3 three "gods" were Socrates' guests; "today" Socrates
is the "gods"' guest and is "divinely" entertained. Cronos
is the eldest, as is well known; thus he has to precedeprecisely in time. He is the father of Zeus and Ares; as
"Critias" he is the host of the strangers Timaeus and Hermocrates. He is somber and loves the night. Therefore
"Critias" ponders the old story in the night [26 B]. He
belongs to the old, old time -like the story which he tells
and at the end of which Athens and Atlantis disappear
into the deep, as he himself did, according to the myth.
But according to a -demonstrably~'orphic" interpretation, Cronos is ever and again rejuvenated- there is ever
and again another "Critias!' And the tyrant Critias too
bears the features of c·ronos; the Critias of the Timaeus
is all possible Critiases in one. It is entirely appropriate
for him, as it is for the tyrant Critias, to speak about
"matters of state": the Critias of the Timaeus and of the
Critias tells of a "good old time;' of a period oflife which
is proverbially designated as "the life under Cronos?' Nor
should one forget that for the Greeks, Cronos is associated
with Chronos, although the etymology is actually incorrect. Timaeus' role as Zeus is a consequence of his role
in the dialogue itself: he is the "Father" of the All, "of
gods and of humans;' if only "in speech." [27 A]- he
depicts the construction and ~he "genesis" of the visible
cosmos. Hermocrates is nothing but a warrior. That he
is suited for the relevant conversations here is the opinion of "many!' The joke is that he never even gets his
turn "to speak?' These are three "gods" with whom
Socrates is together, three "rulers," who ''yesterday" allowed
themselves to be instructed about true rulership and who
"today" instruct him about very questionable things. And
comically enough, Cronos-Critias says in the Critias [107
A-B]: "For, Timaeus, it is easier to seem to speak adequately when saying something about gods to human be-
64
ings than about mortals to us." "We:' this means, are the immortals. (Cf. also Timaeus 27 C-D: the ambiguous word
{'llepomen0s" 4 ) Besides, mockery of the "gods" runs through
the whole dialogue.
However, Cronos, Zeus, and Ares are not only the
old "gods:' but much "truer" gods, namely the corresponding planets. In fact, according to the "astronomy" of the
Timaeus, Saturn, Zeus, and Mars themselves together with
the moon form one group of the planets, while the Sun,
Venus, and Mercury represent another (revolving with
the same velocity). But Selene is first of all "feminine"
and secondly not the name of a divinity at all. Hence
"the fourth" is "sick'~and with this the dialogue immediately begins. 5
So that is the "frame" of the Timaeus. I would like in
addition to refer to the alliteration of Cmnos-Critias which
is unlikely to be coincidental and to the connection of
Timaeus and time [honor].
What do you think of this? How does it fit in with
your "esotericism"?
1. Translated and annotated by Laurence Berns, Gisela Berns, Eva
Brann, and Robert Williamson.
2. For the identification of Critias see A E. Taylor, A Commentary
on Plato's Timaeus (Oxford 1928), pp. 23-25 and Warman Welliver,
Character, Plot and Thought in Plato's Timaeus-Critias (Leiden 1977),
pp. 50-57.
3. Politeia is the Greek title of Plato's Republic.
4. hepomenOs can mean either "consequently" or "accordingly." In the
passage cited Timaeus prays to the gods and goddesses that what
is said may be agreeable to them "and consequently [accordingly]
to us." The first meaning conveys merely that "we" derive our
pleasure from the gods' pleasure but the second implies that "we"
are the gods.
5. In several conversations of later years, Jacob Klein suggested an
alternative interpretation: the missing "fourth" may represent
Uranos, the father of Cronos and, according to some legends, the
oldest of the male gods, who was emasculated by his son. The
Greek word ouranos also means the all-embracing heavens. On this
interpretation, the absence of the "fourth" would suggest that the
promised sequence of speeches by Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates lacks from the outset something needed for a complete
account of the "AU:'
SPRING 1984
�Den 14. August 1939.
Lieber Freund,
desmal moechte ich Dir einige Ergebnisse meines
Timaios-Kopfzerbrechens mitteilen, nicht nur, urn Dich
zu erfreuen, sondern auch, urn mir selbst eine gewisse
Klarheit zu verschaffen. Wie die Dinge liegen, bist Du
wahrscheinlich der einzige Mensch, der mir glauben
wird. Ich glaube etwas ueber den "Rahmen" des Timaios
verstanden zu haben, und das wuerde natuerlich mehr
als der blosse "Rahmen" bedeuten.- Die erste Frage bei
der Lektuere ist die: was soli die Atlantis-Geschichte vor
der Timaios-Rede? Einige ganz schlaue Leute haben sie
bekanntlich an den Anfang des "Kritias" versetzen
wollen. Was an der Atlantis-Geschichte auffaellt, ist die
Betonung des "Alten;' des U r-Alten. Der Sprecher ist
Kritias. Der Zeit nach kann dieser Kritias in cler Tat
nicht cler "Tyrann" sein, er ist anders charakterisiert, ist
zu alt und, bei aller Gleichgueltigkeit gegen "Chronologie" innerhalb cler Dialog-Texte, cler "Tyrann" passt
ueberhaupt nicht in die Sache hinein. Aber dam it kann
man sich natuerlich nicht beruhigen. Angenommen, es
sei nicht der Tyrann Kritias, warum dann [nicht] ein
anclerer Kritias, der (a) Grossvater des Tyrannen ist, und
(b) selbst wiederum einen Grossvater Kritias hat? Und
dann die erste Frage: wenn er das "Programm" entwickelt, gemaess welchem Sokrates seine "Gastgeschenke" vorgesetzt bekommen soH, so kommt ihm die
zweite Rede zu, er nimmt aber faktisch clas Wichtigste
als Erster in seiner Erzaehlung vorweg. U nd der "Kritias"
selbst bleibt Fragment.... N atuerlich ist es moeglich,
class es ein "natuerliches", nicht beabsichtigtes Fragment
ist. Warum nicht? Aber immerhin, es leuchtet einem
nicht recht ein, zumal der Timaios und der Kritias
bestimmt nicht die allerletzten Werke Plato's sind.
Ausserdem fehlt der "Hermokrates:' der im "Kritias" fest
versprochen zu sein scheint (108 A-D) undja auch aus
dem von Kritias im "Timaios" entwickelten "Programm"
sich sozusagen mit Notwendigkeit ergibt. Allerdings ist
aus dem "Programm" (Tim. 27 A-B) nicht recht zu
ersehen, worueber Hermokrates sprechen soH. Am Tage
vorher waren Kritias, Timai()s und Hermokrates Gaeste
des Sokrates. Heute ist Sokrates bei ihnen zu Gast.
Gestern war noch ein "Vierter'' da, heute ist er "krank.'~
Kritias ist also der Grossvater des "bekannten" Kritias
(und hat selbst einen weiteren Kritias zum Grossvater).
Timaios ist unbekannt, ich meine ''historisch;' stammt
aber jedenfalls aus Unteritalien. Hermokrates ist den
Athenern ( und darum uns) sehr gut bekannt: er hat sie
in Sizilien verdroschen-ein tuechtiger Feldherr. Warum
diese Kcmbination?
Die Antwort ist: die drei vertreten- Kronos, Zeus und
Ares. "Gestern;' als Sokrates ueber die Politeia sprach,
waren die drei "Goetter" bei Sokrates zu Gast, "heute"
ist Sokrates bei den "Goettern" zu Gast und wird "goettlich" bewirtet. Kronos ist der Aelteste bekanntlich, er
muss also- gerade in der Zeit- vorangehen. Er ist der
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Vater von Jupiter und Ares, als "Kritias" der Wirt der
"Fremden" Timaios und Hermokrates. Er ist duester und
liebt die Nacht. Daher ueberlegt sich "Kritias" die alte
Geschichte in der Nacht (26 B). Er gehoert in die alte,
alte Zeit -wie die Geschichte, die er erzaehlt und an
deren Ende Athen und Atlantis in die Tiefe verschwinden -wie er selbst der Sage nach. Aber, lautnachweislicher-"orphischer" Interpretation, Kronos wird
immer wieder "verjuengt'~ es gibt immer wieder
"Kritias." Und auch der "Tyrann" Kritias traegt KronosZuege; der Kritias des "Timaios" ist aile moeglichen
"Kritiasse" in einem. Es kommt ihm durchaus zu -wie
dem Tyrannen Kritias- ueber "staatliche" Dinge zu
sprechen. Der Kritias des "Timaios" und des "Kritias"
berichtet ueber eine "gute, alte Zeit;' ueber eine LebensPeriode, die sprichwoertlich als 6 btl KpOvou Pio<;
bezeichnet wird. U nd nicht zu vergessen ist, class fuer
die Griechen- obgleich die Etymologie gar nicht
stimmt- Kronos mit Chronos zusammenhaengt.Timaios' Zeus-Rolle ergibt sich aus seiner Rolle im
Dialog selbst: er ist der "Vater" des Ails "Der Goetter
und der Menschen':.._wenn auch nur t0 A.Oy41 (27 A)-,
er schildert den Bau und die "Entstehung'' des sichtbaren
Kosmos.- Hermokrates ist nichts als Krieger. Dass er
sich fuer die hier in Frage kommenden Gespraeche
eignet, ist die Meinung 'Vieler'' (20 B). Der Witz ist der,
class er garnicht "zu Wort" kommt- Es sind drei "Goetter;' mit denen Scikrates zusammen ist, drei "Herrscher;'
die sich von Sokrates ueber wahre Herrschaft "gestern"
belehren lassen und ibn "heute" ueber sehr fragwuerdige Dinge belehren. Und ulkig genug sagt Kronos~
Kritias im "Kritias" (107 A/B): m:pi 9e&v ydp, d) TiJ.L(UE,
A.tyovtd TtnpO<; Uv9p6:mou<; 8oKeiv iKo.vOO<; A.tyew {JQ.ov
~
7tEpi Ov~<WV npo, ~~a,.
"Wir" sind naemlich die "Unsterblichen'' (vgl. auch Tim.
27 C/D: das zweideutige Wort btaJ.LtVm<;). Im uebrigen
zieht sich durch den ganzen Dialog die Verspottung der
"Goetter" durch.
Nun sind aber Kronos, Zeus und Ares nicht nur die
alten "Goetter;' sondern viel "wahrere" Goetter, naemlich
die entsprechenden Planeten. Und zwar bilden Saturn,
Jupiter und Mars gemaess cler "Astronomie" des
"Timaios" selbst zusammen mit dem Moncl eine Gruppe
der Planeten, waehrend Sonne, Venus und Merkur eine
andere (mit derselben Geschwindigkeit kreisende)
Gruppe darstellen. Aber Selene ist erstens einmal
"weiblich" und zweitens gar kein "Goetter"- N arne. Daher
ist "der Vierte" "krank':.._womit cler Dialog unmittelbar
beginnt.
Das ist also der "Rahmen" des Timaios. Ich moechte
auch noch auf die wahrscheinlich nicht zufaellige
Alliteration Kr onos-Kr itias hinweisen und auf den
Zusammenhang von Timaios und time.
Was haeltst Du davon? Wie passt das mit Deiner
"Esoterik" zusammen?
65
�OccAsiONAL DiscouRsEs
Spring 1984
The Roots of Modernity*
Eva Brann
T
he part of the title of this talk w.hich I asked
to have announced is "The Roots of
Modernity:' But there is a second part which
I wanted to tell you myself. The full title is:
"The Roots of Modernity in Perversions of
ChristianitY:'
The reason I wanted to tell you myself is that it is
a risky title, which might be easily misunderstood,
especially since "perversion" is strong language. So let
me begin by explaining to you what I intend and why
I chose to talk to you about such a subject.
I think you will recognize my first observation right
off; you might even think it hardly worth saying. It is
that we live in "the modern age." We never stop trying
to live up to that universally acknowledged fact: we are
continually modernizing our kitchens, our businesses and
our religions.
Now what is actually meant by "modern times?" The
term cannot just mean "contemporary" because all times
are con-temporary with themselves. Modern is a Latin
word which means ')ust now." Modern times are the times
which are in a special way "just now:' Modernity is justnowness, up-to-date-ness. Perhaps that doesn't seem like
a very powerful distinguishing characteristic, because,
again, what times are not just now for themselves? How
is our modern age distinguished from ancient times, or
from that in-between era we call the "middle" ages, all
in comparison with our present times?
Well, the first answer is very simple. We live
differently in our time from the way those who came
before us lived in theirs. For instance, when we speak
of something or even someone as being "up to date" we
are implying that what time it is, is significant, that time
marches, or races, on by itself, and we have the task of
keeping up with it. Our time is not a comfortable natural
niche within the cycle of centuries, but a fast sliding rug
being pulled out from under us.
* This talk was written in 1979 for delivery at Whitworth College,
a Presbyterian school in Spokane, Washington. I was somewhat reluctant to submit it for publication, being mindful of Curtis Wilson's
severe but just criticism of an apparently similar effort in the last
issue of the St. John's Review (''A Comment on Alexandre Koji':ve's
'The Christian Origins of Modem Science' "). However, I was persuaded that the differences were sufficient to take the chance. E.B.
66
Furthermore, we have a sense of the extraordinariness
of our times; we think they are critical and crucial, that
something enormous is about to be decided, or revealed.
You might say that we don't just have a sense of doom
or delivery, but that things are, in fact, that way. And
yet such a feeling of crisis has marked decades of every
century for the last half-millenium. Modernity itself is,
apparently, a way of charging the Now with special
significance.
To ask about the roots of modernity is to ask what
made. this state, this chronically hectic state, we are in
come about. By the roots of modernity I mean the true
beginnings, the origin of our way of being in time.
At this point you might think that I am talking of
history and that I am planning to lecture to you on the
various historical movements which led up to our day.
But not so. Such "movements'!_ be they the Protestant
Reformation or the Industrial Revolution- are themselves only the names given to the sum of events which
are in need of explanation. Let me give an example. Suppose I were to explain the resolve or habit some of you
live with of turning directly to Scripture for your
knowledge concerning faith, by saying that you are "products" of the Protestant Reformation. This historical explanation would sound as if I were saying something
significant, but in fact it would say nothing about ·the
inner reasons why a part of Christianity decided to return
directly to the Bible. And inner reasons, namely ideas,
are in the end the only satisfying explanation of the actions of human beings.
Next, in explaining my title, I have to tell you what
I mean here by Christianity. I do not refer to the faith
itself. Nor do I mean specific dogma, that is to say,
dogmatics. What I do mean are certain spiritual and intellectual modes, certain ways of approaching thought
and life and the world, which are perhaps more noticeable
even to a non-Christian than to someone who lives within
Christianity. I hope the examples I mean to give you will
clarify what I am saying.
And finally I want to define as carefully as possible
what I meall by a "perversion."
I do not mean something blatantly heretical or terrifically evil, which we moderns should cast out. For one
thing I am not myself a Christian, and it is not my
business to demand the purification of other people's
SPRING 1984
�faith. For another, I mean to show 1pat all of us, simply
by reason of living as moderns, have been deeply
penetrated by these perversions and that we could hardly
carry on without them. They are an unavoidable part
of our lives. When I say "unavoidable" I do not mean
that there is no possibility and no point in resisting them.
In my opinion there are no inevitable movements but
only human beings willing, and on occasion unwilling,
to go along. These perversions are unavoidable only in
the sense that once certain very potent trains of ideas
had been set into the world, they were bound to be carried beyond themselves, to be driven to their inherent
but unintended conclusion.
Perhaps, then, I should speak less dramatically and
say that it is the secularization of certain Christian notions that is at the root of modernity. Nevertheless, I do
want to hold on to the stronger word to describe this
development, and for the following reasons.
You all know what the sin of Satan is said to have
been. It was resistance to God and rebellion against his
creator, and its cause was pride, the sin of sins. Satanic
pride, any pride, is, theologically speaking, a perverse
will, literally a will that turns things awry. In particular
it overturns the relation of the creature to his creator.
Satan rebels because he cannot bear to be derivative and
subordinate, and least of all to be more remote from the
center of knowledge than Christ. He communicates that
terrible impatience to Eve in the Garden when he tempts
her with the fruit of knowledge and promises "Ye shall
be as gods, knowing good and evil,':..... in Latin, this is the
scientia boni et mali.
Now, as it happens, the men of the generation around
1600 Anno Domini- the generation which was most
pointedly responsible for modernity and in whose
writings it roots are to be most explicitly seen- these men
were also unspeakably proud. I am thinking of names
probably familiar to you: of Galileo Galilei, of Rene
Descartes and of Francis Bacon, an Italian, a Frenchman
and an Englishman. You need only glance at the engraving published as the frontispiece of the most accessible
translation of Descartes' works to see how haughty he
looks.
olletheless anyone who reads their books must
be struck with the sober and restrained character
of their writing. They keep claiming that they
are not revealing great mysteries or setting out momentous discoveries. They present themselves as merely having found a careful, universally accessible method, which,
once they have set it out, can be used by all mankind.
All that is needed is the willingness to throw off old prejudices and preoccupations, all that Bacon calls our
"idols;" we are to throw off the nonsense of the ages and
to apply sober human reason to clearly-defined problems.
In other words, these initiators of modernity are
preaching rebellion against the traditional wisdom, but
in measured, careful, sometimes even dull words, so dry
N
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that students often get rather bored with reading them.
That is, they get bored partly with the measured dryness
with which this tremendous rebellion is announced,
partly because the Baconian-Cartesian revolution is so
much in our bones, has been so precisely the overwhelming success its authors expected it to be that we, its heirs,
hardly recognize the revolutionary character of its
original declarations of independence.
But the overweening pride of these first moderns was
not essentially in the fact that they were aware of opening a new age. That was too obvious to them and they
were of too superior a character to glory much in it. Their
pride was the pride of rebellion, though not, perhaps,
against God. Interpretations differ about their relations
to faith, and I think they worshipped God in their way,
or at least had a high opinion of him as the creator of
a rationally accessible world, and they co-opted him as
the guarantor of human rationality. Their rebellion is
rather against all intermediaries between themselves and
God and his nature. They want to be next to him and
like him. So they fall to being not creatures but creators.
Let me give you a few bits of evidence for this contention. First, they all had a cautiously sympathetic
respect for Satan.
For example, as you may know, both Galileo and
Descartes had trouble with the publication of their works.
Galileo had such trouble because he supported Copernicus in his view that the earth is not fixed at the center
of the universe, but travels around, a wanderer (which
is what the word planet literally means) in the world,
so that we human 'beings become cosmic travelers, able
to see the heavens from various perspectives. Now, the
authorities of the Catholic Church at that time, considered the fixed central place of the earth as crucial to
the character of the place God had chosen to become incarnate. But they were not so crude as to quarrel with
an alternative astronomical hypothesis, if it happened to
be mathematically satisfying. What they forbade Galileo
to assert in public was that this was the true reality and
not just a possible theory. In this they were in the best
tradition of ancient science. The astronomers had always
known that there were alternative mathematical hypotheses for explaining the heavenly motions, depending on
one's point of view. The Ptolemaic, geocentric system was
simply the one more in accord with the evidence of our
unaided sense- everyone can see the sun running
through the sky-and the system then and now most useful for navigation. What the Church required of Galileo
was that he should keep science hypothetical instead of
claiming that it revealed the reality of the heavens; this
earth's motion could be asserted hypothetically but not
as a fact. We all know that he pretended to yield, but
is said to have muttered: '1\.nd yet it moves?' By that stubharness he showed himself the archetypal scientist. I
mean, he made it possible for that word scientia which
means simply knowledge, as in the scientia boni et mali,
to come to be confined to such knowledge of reality as
67
�Galileo had, which is what we call science today. Among
such realities is the fact that the he~vens are full of real
matter which is indistinguishable fr,om and moves just
as do the stones on earth.
,
Now Galileo and also Descartes, who had similar
troubles with the theological faculty of the University of
Paris, the Sorbonne, did find a publisher in Holland. And
this Dutch publisher had a most revealing emblem which
includes a very serpent-like vine twining around a tree,
an apple tree, I imagine, whose fruit is the new scientia}
modern science. Of course, the serpent is Satan's shape
as he tempts human beings to knowledge beyond that
proper to a creature! "Ye shall be as gods , knowing good
and evil."
A few more examples. When Bacon first sets out those
procedures which are now smoothly familiar under the
name of the scientific method, he constructed a type of
experiment he slyly calls light-bringing or "luciferic" experiments. You all know that the angelic name of Satan
before his revolution in heaven and his fall was Lucifer,
or the Light-bearer. Again, some of you have probably
read Milton's Paradise Lost, and perhaps you can compare
Milton's Satan with Dante's. Dante's Satan is a horrible,
inhuman figure encased in ice in the lowest hell in Inferno. Milton's modern Satan has much grandeur. He
is in fact represented as an overwhelmingly proud, antique, even Homeric, hero. Or one last example: Dr.
Faustus, an evidently not altogether fictional scholar who
stands on the brink of modernity, has a real intimacy
with the devil. And in those old tales from which the
famous later treatments are taken Faust sells his soul to
him not only for the pleasures and the dominion of the
world, but also for the secrets of modern astronomy and
algebra.
Here let me repeat my caution: I am not saying that
these founders of modernity played silly and wicked
blasphemous games, but only that they still had the
theological learning and the grandeur of imagination to
know what their enterprize resembled.
ow let me give you three enlightening complementary facts. Bacon wrote a book, a kind of
scientific utopia called the New Atlantis, a place
which is an imaginary island lying off the shore of
America. The book is, in fact, the first description of a
scientific research complex. Bacon calls the group of people in charge of it "the College of the Six Days' Work:'
Furthermore, Galilee's work called the Two-New Sciences,
in which he sets out the beginning of modern physics,
is a dialogue taking place on a succession of days, possibly
six. And finally Descartes's Meditations, intended to
prepare the world for modern science, takes place in six
sessions. There is no question in my mind but that these
men were thinking of themselves as re-doing God's work
of the creation, as creating a new world or re-creating
the old one in an accessibly intelligible, illuminated form,
and as revealing what they had done in a new kind of
N
68
scripture. They were light-bringers, making us, their
heirs, like gods, knowing a source for re-making the
world, for better or worse, as new creators. Here, finally,
is the point I have been leading up to; you may find it
a little outrageous, but see whether you can deny it: We,
almost all of us, have so totally absorbed such an attitude
that we hardly notice what we are saying anymore. Let
me ask you when you have last said that you wanted to
"do something creative" with your life, or have been told
to "think creatively" or called someone you admired "so
creative:' In fact we are in the habit of referring to all
our more exciting activities as "creative:' But creativity
is a precise theological idea whose meaning we are partly forgetting, partly perverting to our modern use.
Creativity means the ability to bring something into being out of nothing, in Latin, "ex nihilo;' frOm the very
beginning, as God is implied in Genesis to have separated
the heavens and the earth out of a chaos of his own
creating.
Clearly we are quite incapable of such production.
For example, take a potter to whose work we may refer
as "very creative." But a potter has clay out of which the
pottery is fashioned and a wheel on which it is thrown.
The ancient Greeks referred to all such work as "making," for which the Greek word is poesis, and they used
that word particularly for that kind of making which is
done in words and which we still call poetry. Creative
poetry is therefore, strictly speaking, a contradiction in
terms, and yet that adjective has a revealing significance.
For a maker works on given material according to a
tradition and from a pattern. But a creator is free of all
those restrictive circumstances and bound above all by
the inner demands of self-expression. It makes for that
kind of production we peculiarly think of as "Art;' with
all its courage, cleverness, sophistication and emphasis
on the artist's individuality. The story of modern art is
the story of the triumph of rebellious creativity, of
creativity divorced from its proper, superhuman agent.
But artistic creativity is only a later outcome of the
original perversion of the notion, and indeed, a reaction
to it. The first, and still predominant application of the
notion of human creativity is the re-enactment of the sixdays' work I have already referred to. That is to say, it
is the science of nature and its application, called
technology, which appears to put humanity in control
of the creation.
Now modern science, it seems to me, has two separate
roots. One is Greek. The Greeks began the development
of those mathematical tools which characterize modern
science. They also distinguished and named the science
of physics. Physics is a Greek word derived from physis,
which means growth and movement and is usually
translated as "nature." But the natural science of the
Greeks was, I think, in its very essence, incapable of
mechanical application. It was pure theory.-Theory is
another Greek word which means "beholding;' "contemplation:' The Greek physicists looked on natural be-
SPRING 1984
�ings but they did not control nature. You will not be surprised when I say that I think this attitude has everything
to do with the fact that the greatest of them, Aristotle,
regarded the world not as having a beginning and an
end but as unmade and indestructible.
Something very different had to arise to induce the
frame of mind which made a technological science possible. It was not merely the notion of creation, for you
remember that when God asks Job in the Old Testament:
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the
earth?", Job has no answer.- He is overcome by his own
impotence in the face of God's power over nature. But
these moderns I have been speaking of, they do have an
answer. For example, when God goes on to ask; "Canst
thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee,
Here we are?" Of course, the modern answer is: Yes, we
were there; yes, we can. What has intervened?
What has intervened is, I think, the notion that God
can appear in human form and work miracles, that transubstantiations, that is, substantial transformations of
nature can take place: in sum, that the creation can be
controlled from within. Modern science takes, I believe,
some of its impulse and much of its pathos from a
secularized version of these notions.
There are dozens of other aspects of modernity which
have a similar origin in a secularized version of Christian notions. Because I cannot set them out carefully nOw,
let me just pour them out before you and then choose
that one which particularly bears on the just-nowness,
the peculiar "modernity" of our time for a brief final word.
Here is a mere list of such aspects. It will probably
be a little unintelligible; it is certainly incomplete; but
it might be suggestive. Modernity, then, has adopted from
Christianity:
• The search for certainty in philosophic matters,
• The notion of a total adherence to an idea ( cf. the
bookburning of Acts 19: 19, 20, Hume, Enquiry, last
para.),
• A burning interest in facts of existence and in their
ordinary or extraordinary standing,
• The concentration on the self and its expression,
• The emphasis on the will and its power,
• The fascination with freedom,
• The conversion of the antique noble virtues to virtues of benevolence (such as Jefferson explicitly
urged),
• The passion for equality,
• The notion of salvation through work (cf. Weber,
The Protestant Spirit),
• The overwhelming importance of the written word,
• The idea of historical change.
et me, by way of finishing off, dwell a little on the
last aspect. I cannot imagine that there is anyone
here who does not have one of two possible attitudes toward the past. You may think either that the
past is too much dead and gone to bother with in this
L
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
modern, fast-changing world. Or you may think that you
need to study the past to get some perspective on the present day and its uniqueness. But that means that whether
or not you are interested in the academic discipline called
history, you believe in History as a movement of time
in which essential and irreversible changes come about,
and many of you may also think that this movement is
toward something, either doom or fulfillment, that is either
progress or decline.
The ancient pagans, to be sure, also knew that every
present passes away, that kings die, empires crumble and
ancestors moulder in their tombs. They too kept chronicles of times past, to keep alive the memory of heroes
or to prove how ancient was their own descent, and they
certainly thought that the world might have its epochs
and its cycles. But, to my knowledge, they never, never,
thought of history as having an intelligible, purposeful
movement; they never thought that time contained moments of revelation, or bore a spirit, or had in it a beginning and an inevitable end. Hence they had none of our
preoccupation with the future as a shape coming toward
us. What we keep calling "tomorrow's world" was for them
simply the "not yet;' the nothing.
Now I think that this way of thinking of time was
prepared for us by the Christian notion of the irruption
into time of divinity, that is, by the Incarnation, and by
the promise of a Second Coming and a Day of judgment
and a New Kingdom. The secularization these ideas have
undergone has removed their precise theological
significance, and what we have retained is only a sense
of doom or of progress, according to our temperaments;
and a sense of the whirling advance of time. But that
sense of living in a Now which is both unique and
vanishing- that is exactly what is meant by modernity.
Let me conclude by repeating what I said in the
beginning. This is emphatically not a sermon but alecture, and so I am in no way urging some sort of purification of modernity. On the contrary, I hope to have shown
that modernity consists of such perversions of notions
drawn from Christianity, and that to be a modern means
to be deeply enmeshed in them.
But there is a conclusion to be drawn. It is that there
is no way to understand ourselves and our world without
some deep study of the J udaeo-Christian tradition. Let
me tell you a brief anecdote. Some of my colleagues-forthe-year at Whitman College were arguing over the current curriculum reform the college is undertaking and
the difficulties of finding a subject matter that all could
agree on as indispensable. One member of the group
finally asked: What would you all say if you were asked
what was the single most necessary study? Then a man
who has, I am sure, only the loosest religious affiliations
answered unhesitatingly: Theology. And no one was willing to deny his explanation that students need a framework in which to think about the nature and ends of their
life. My point today has been that they need the same
study to understand the nature and ends of their time.
69
�BooK REVIEW
The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response.
Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1983
viii+103 pp., $1.50 (paper)
Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age
Michael Novak
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983
144 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Catholics and Nuclear War: A Commentary on "The Challenge of
Peace;' the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace
Philip J. Murnion, ed.
New York: Crossroad, 1983
xxii+346 pp., $10.95 (paper)
The Bishops and the Bomb: Waging Peace in a Nuclear Age
Jim Castelli
Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1983
283 pp., $7.95 (paper)
very group today seems to have a The drafting process also found the comleft and a right -legislatures, school mittee members accommodating themboards, advisory commissions, even sdves not only to the Catholic just-war
committees of Roman Catholic bishops. tradition but also to new expressioJ;lS of
The Committee on War and Peace of the pacifism among their fellow bishops and
National Conference of Catholic Bishops to the strongly expressed views of the
(NCCB) was evidently planned that way. Reagan administration and the Vatican.
Archbishop John Roach, the NCCB The story of this consultative process, unpresident. who appointed the committee's precedented for an American bishops'
chairman, has said, "I wanted articulate conference, has been competently told by
people at the extremes:' For the left wing, religion reporter Jim Castelli in The
Archbishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Ber- Bishops and the Bomb. In tantalizing detail,
nardin of Chicago selected Auxiliary Castelli describes the special influence
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, a wielded by two advisers to the commitwell known pacifist and president of Pax tee: the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, director of
Christi U.S.A.; for the right wing, Aux- the bishops' Office of International Justice
iliary Bishop John O'Connor of the Mili- · and Peace, and Bruce Martin Russett, a
tary Ordinariate. The other members, Yale political science professor appointed
Bishop Daniel Reilly of Norwich, Conn., as the committee's principal consultant.
and Auxiliary Bishop George Fulcher of Hehir and to a lesser extent Russett were
Columbus, Ohio, were expected to be responsible for much of the precise
swing votes. Bernardin's skills at guiding language and subtle reasoning of the
this group to a consensus without visibly letter.
taking sides were unquestioned.
How the bishops' committee pulled
The bishop's committee worked from and hauled between the hawk and the
1981 to 1983, producing four drafts of a dove positions of O'Connor and Gumblebook-length pastoral letter on nuclear ton reveals some interesting aspects of the
weapons and U.S. defense policy entitled leftward drift of episcopal political views,
The Challenge of Peace. The drafts but the real significance of The Challenge
themselves, which culminated in the of- of Peace resides in the final text itselfficial version adopted by the NCCB in what it says, what it implies, how well it
May 1983, reflect major shifts of opinion argues its case, how it can be interpreted,
among the committee members, the how it will be used. The letter is signifibishops at large, and consultants to the cant both for the American Catholic comcommittee both invited and uninvited. munity and for the security of the nation.
E
70
The bishops' rhetoric rings clear and
strong: "as a people, we must refuse to
legitimate the idea of nuclear war . . .
our 'nd to nuclear war must, in the end,
be definitive and decisive" (Challenge, pars.
131, 138.) [These paragraph numbers are
used in all published texts of the letter;
the text is available in a low-priced edition from the U.S. Catholic Conference
and as an appendix to the Castelli and
Murnion books.] The bishops translate
their rhetoric into moral anathemas,
solemnly condemning the use of nuclear
weapons against population centers, retaliatory use of nuclear weapons "which
would indiscriminately take many wholly
innocent lives" and any "deliberate initiation of nuclear warfare, on however restricted a scale" (147-150). Although the
letter avoids a blanket condemnation of
any use of any nuclear weapon under any
circumstances, the bishops make no attempt to specify conditions under which
a nuclear weapon could be used morally.
If no moral wartime uses of nuclear
weapons can be foreseen, what moral
status can be attributed to a policy of
nuclear deterrence? The bishops' treat~
ment of deterrence mostly consists of expressions of concern and perplexity.
Deterrence, they write, is "currently the
most dangerous dimension of the nuclear
arms race" (162); it is a "moral and
political paradox" (167) as well as a "contemporary dilemma'' (174); and "any claim
SPRING 1984
�by any government that it is pursuing a
morally acceptable policy of deterrenc~
must be scrutinized with the greatest care"
(195).
ad the bishops been left to think
for themselves, they might well
have moved to a condemnation of
deterrence, as a goodly number of their
confreres wanted. But in June 1982 Pope
John Paul II sent a message to the Second
U.N. Special Session on Disarmament
containing a sentence on deterrence that
would once and for all determine the
American bishops' position: "In current
conditions;' the Pope wrote, "'deterrence'
based on balance, certainly not as an end
in itself but as a step on the way toward
a progressive disarmament, may still be
judged morally acceptable" (Challenge,
173). Taking this sentence as a papal
directive, the bishops simply adopted it
as their policy, interpreting it in American
terms, elaborating it in different language, without criticizing or altering it.
The effect on The Challenge of Peace was
seriously to soften the core of the letter
by substituting moral assertions on deterrence for moral analysis. The bishops'
own versions ofJohn Paul's statement on
deterrence include their "strictly conditioned moral acceptance of nuclear deterrence" (186) and their "lack of unequivocal
condemnation of deterrence" (192). The
strict conditions specify that deterrence
must be minimally sufficient and that
each new deterrent strategy and weapon
must be judged "in light of whether it will
render steps toward 'progressive disarm ament' more or less likely" (188).
The bishops' loyalty to the Pope's
every sentence prevented them not only
from developing their own moral analysis
of deterrence but also from uncovering a
serious deficiency in the papal statement
itself. John Paul evidently opposes deterrence if it is "an end in itself' but approves
of it "as a step on the way'' to disarmament. But in the real world of massive
Soviet threats and refractory U.S.-Soviet
negotiations, deterrence never is an end
in itself but definitely is a need in itself.
By itself it is not -and cannot be -a step
on the way toward disarmament. Deterrence is needed to deter the Soviet Union
from using its weapons. If the Soviets
decide not to negotiate, deterrence will be
needed; if a new treaty is signed, deterrence will still be needed; if George Kennan's dream of a 50 percent reduction in
nuclear weaponry is realized, deterrence
will still be needed. To be sure, disarmament is another need, but deterrence and
H
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
disarmament are different in kind. To tie
them together as the Pope did -with the
American bishops dutifully agreeingconfuses any argument about the morality or immorality of deterrence policies.
The moral category most in need of
study with respect to deterrence is the notion of intention. To a nuclear pacifist, the
intention of deterrence is analogous to the
plan of a murderer and is to be damned
accordingly. But since the goal of deterrence is to prevent war, not to wage war,
the moral question is not that easy to
answer. Michael Novak, in Moral Clarity
in the Nuclear Age (archly described by
Castelli as a "counterpastoral"), has
vigorously argued for moral approval of
deterrence:
It is clear that the complexities of
nuclear deterrence change the
meaning of intention and threat as
these words are usually used in
moral discourse. Those who intend
to prevent the usc of nuclear
weapons by maintaining a system
of deterrence in readiness for use do
intend to use such weapons, but only
in order not to use them, and do
threaten to use them, but only in
order to deter their use . . .
Clearly, it is a more moral choice
and occasions lesser evil to hold a
deterrent intention than it is to
allow nuclear attack. [Moral Clarity~
pp. 59, 61]
Moral Clarity ~·n the Nuclear Age is the
most cogent critique of the American
bishops' judgments yet to be published,
though it addresses itself mainly to the
issues rather than to the text of The
Challenge of Peace. The pastoral letter invites dialogue and criticism by claiming
that one of the major purposes of Catholic
teaching on war and peace is "to contribute to the public policy debate about
the morality of war" (16). From Novak,
in the book under review and in num~
erous articles, the bishops have been getting what they apparently want. In the
collection of essays, Catholics and Nuclear
JiVtzr, however, too much of the criticism
is mild and too many of the essaysists
follow the lead of the Rev. Theodore
Hesburgh, who in the book's foreward
writes, ''I believe [the pastoral letter] is the
-finest document that the American
Catholic hierarchy has ever produced"
(Catholics, p. vii). The writers in this
volume are mostly Catholics, about half
and half clerical and lay; well-known
names among them include the Rev.
Hehir and Prof. Russett, the Rev. Charles
E. Curran, James Finn, the Rev. David
Hollenbach, George F. Kennan, David J.
O'Brien, the Rev. Richard A. McCor~
mick, Peter Steinfels, Lester C. Thurow,
Gordon C. Zahn, et al.
nevitably when theologians take up
public policy, some bizzare opinions
emerge. For example, Sister Sandra
M. Schneiders, professor of New Testament and Spirituality at the Jesuit School
of Theology in Berkeley, locates a problem in connecting sacred scripture with
contemporary issues: "The problem is;'
she writes, "that we lack an adequate
hermeneutical theory" (Catholics, p. 91). As
to coping with nuclear weapons, Sister
Schneiders believes
I
it is not a theory of just war,
however morally sound, but the
gospel imperative to make peace
even at the cost of ultimate selfsacrifice that must guide our
response to the question of nuclear
arms. [p. 95]
To counter the Soviet Union's weapons,
Schneiders recommends for the United
States not an arsenal but "Christian defiance of death" (p. 103). For another example, Georgetown theologian Richard
McCormick brings his scholarly skills to
bear on the question of intention in
nuclear deterrence but gets helplessly tied
up in "ultimate intent;' ('instrumental intention," "comsummatory intention;' ('objective intentionality" and "inbuilt intentionality" (pp. 173-177 passim).
Catholics and Nuclear JiVtzr on the whole
is much better than these examples,
however. James Finn, editor of Freedom at
Issue, asks a central question:
Finally, we must ask whether [the
bishops'] recommendations, if they
become policy, would move us
'(toward a more stable system of national and international security"
(196), as the bishops intend, or
toward some less desirable and
more dangerous situation. [p. 133]
Finn finds serious flaws in the bishops'
analysis of deterrence, in their understanding of the facts of the "arms race"
and in their joining of the traditions of
just war and pacifism. His conclusion
about the bishops' letter should worry all
of us: "I believe their recommendations,
if pressed into operation, would weaken
the security of the United States and its
allies" (p. 145).
Another worthwhile essay in this book
comes from the M.I.T. economist Lester
71
�Thurow. Entitled "The Arms Race and
the Economic Order;' Thurow's piece
takes up the bishops' treatment of the interdependence of rich and poor nation,s:
The section of the bishops' pastoral
letter that is most directly relevant
to economics and the arms race is
entitled, "Interdependence: From
Fact to Policy" (III.B.3). Unfortunately, the section does not start
with "fact" and therefore does not
lead to "policy?' The essence of the
section is to be found in the second
half of the quotation from Vatican
II: "The arms race is one of the
greatest curses on the human race
and the harm that it inflicts upon
the poor is more than can be endured." The section essentially implies that poor countries are poor
(at least partially) because they have
been exploited by rich, militarily
powerful countries. [Catholics, p.
207.]
72
Of this claim -a claim that has become
the common coin -of today's politicalreligious rhetoric-Thurow says, "The
evidence for this assertion is lacking in the
bishops' letter and denied by historical
research'' (p. 207). He follows with his
own conclusion about the relationship of
arms to poverty: "There is no doubt that
the arms race hurts the poor, but the arms
race that impacts the poor is not that between the Soviet Union and the United
States but that among poor countries" (p.
208).
Serious criticism from the left comes
from the long-time pacifist Gordon Zahn,
who is disturbed by the bishops' reliance
on the just-war theory as their moral
framework but pleased with the bishops'
"recognition of evangelical pacifism as a
legitimate option for the Catholic"
(Catholics, p. 130). "It is time;' Zahn
believes, "to dismiss once and for all the
just-war formulations as irrelevant to the
realities of modern war" (p. 130).
Recognizing that the bishops are moving
to the left, Zahn gives them his partial approval, calling the letter "a slight turn in
the right direction" (p. 131).
The American Catholic bishops, to
their credit, have stimulated a new phase
in the forty-year-old national dialogue on
nuclear weapons. Whether their mixture
of religion and politics will be more
beneficial to the world than such mixtures
have been in past centuries remains to be
seen. So far one thing about The Challenge
of Peace is clear: the bishops, whatever they
have to teach, have a lot to learn about
nuclear weapons and U.S. defense policy.
Robert L. Spaeth
Robert L. Spaeth, former tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, is dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences at St. John's University, Collegeville, Minn.,
and the author of No Easy Answers: Chn"stians Debate
Nuclear Armr, recently published by Winston Press,
Minneapolis.
SPRING 1984
�Cumulative Index,
April 1969-Winter 1984
The last cumulative index, marking eight years of publication, appeared
in the July 1977 issue of The College. This spring, after fifteen years as first
The College (Apr 69-Jul 79); then The College/The St. John's Review Gan and
Jul 80); and now The St. John's Review (since the Winter 81 issue), it seems
appropriate to bring the index up to date.
The following list, arranged alphabetically by author, includes all material
published from April 1969 through Winter 1984. Photocopies of specific articles are available at $.20 a page, minimum order $2.00; requests should be
addressed to the managing editor in Annapolis.
Aldanov, Mark
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907:
the "Exes" (from The Suicides), (trans.
Joel Carmichael_) ... Winter/Spring 83
Alexander, Sidney
The Rainfall in the Pine Grove;
The Mannequins;
The Donkey Rides the Man
(poems) ..... Autumn/Winter 82-3
Allanbrook, Douglas
The Spanish Civil War ........ Apr 72
Three Preludes for the Piano ... Jan 73
Power and Grace ............. Jan 77
Truth~Telling and the Iliad . Summer 83
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Dance, Gesture, and The Marriage
of Figaro . . . ................ Apr
Don Giovanni, or the Triviality of
Seduction . . . . . . . . .
. ...... Jul
Mozart's Cherubino ........ Winter
Ardrey, Daniel
My Memoir of Our
Revolution . .
. Winter/Spring
Aron, Raymond
For Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jan
Soviet Hegemonism:
Year 1
. . . . . . . Summer
Bacon, Helen
The Contemporary Reader and
Robert Frost . . . . . . . . . . . . Summer
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
74
79
82
83
80
81
81
Barr, Stringfellow
Tribute to Robert M. Hutchins Oct 77
Bart, Robert S.
Hell: Paola and Francesca
Jul 71
Commencement Address,
Annapolis 1975 . .
Jul 75
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service . . . . . . . . . . .......... Jan 79
Barzun, Jacques
William James,
Moralist ...... Autumn/Winter 82-83
Baumann, Fred
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography
(book review)
.... Jul 79
Affirmative Action and the Rights
of Man . . . . . . .
. .......... jul 80
Beall, James H.
Solstice on the First Watch; The
Horizon as the Last Ship Home
(poems) . . . . .
Summer 83
Bell, Charles G.
The Number of My Loves
(poem)
. . . .. .. .. ..
Jul 70
Two Sorts of Poetic Revision .... jul 73
Prodigal Father (narrative) ..... Jan 80
Five Translations (poems) ... Winter 82
Berns, Gisela
Schiller's Drama- Fulfillment of
History and Philosophy
in Poetry . . . .
. ..... Summer 82
Berns, Laurence
The College and the Underprivileged . . . . . .
Apr 69
Reasonable Politics and
Technology
Sep 70
Memorial to Leo Strauss . . . . Jan 74
Memorial for Simon Kaplan ... Jan 80
Blanton, Ted A.
High School Workshop . . . . . . . Jan 74
Memorial to Leo Strauss . . .
Jan 74
Blistein, Burton
Some Notes on the Lost Wax
Process
.. Apr 73
Blum, Etta
From The Hills as Waves
(poems) ............ .
Summer 81
Bolotin, David
On Sophocles' Ajax ...
..... Jul 80
Irwin's Plato's Moral Theory
(book review)
Winter 81
Bonfante, Guiliano
The Birth of a Literary
Language
. . . . . . . . . . . . Jan 80
Born, Timothy
Poisie, by Paul Valery
(translation)
..... Jul 73
Bosco, Joseph A.
Defeat in Vietnam, Norman
Podhoretz's Why ~ Were in Vietnam
(Review Essay) Autumn/Winter 82-83
Brann, Eva T. H.
A Reading of the Gettysburg
Address .................... Apr 69
The Venetian Phaedrus . .
. Jul 72
The Poet of the Odyssey . . . . . . Apr 74
Commencement Address,
Annapolis, 1974 ............. Jul 74
The Perfections of Jane Austen . Apr 75
Graduate Institute Commencement
Address, 1975
.. Jan 76
Concerning the Declaration of
Independence . . . . . . . . . .
J ul 76
On the Imag-ination ........... Jan 78
73
�Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jan 79
For Bert Thoms . . . . . . . . . . . . Jul J9
Inner and Outer Freedom . . . . . Jul 79
Kant's Imperative . .
. ..... Jan ~0
"Plato's Theory of Ideas" . . . .
J ul 80
Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" . . . . . . . . . . .
Summer 81
The Permanent Part of
Autumn 81
the College
Summer 83
Against Time
Winter 84
Intellect and Intuition
Bridgman, Laura
R. F. Christian, ed., Tolstoy's Letters.
(book review) . . . . . . . . .
. . Jul 79
Brown, Ford K.
Commencement Address,
Annapolis 1973
Jul 73
Bruell, Christopher
Summer 81
Thucydides and Perikles
Buchanan, Scott
The New Program at St. John's
College . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oct 72
Bulkley, Honor
At Home and Abroad: Letter from
Nicaragua and Guatemala . Winter 81
Cantor, Paul
The Ground of Nature: Shakespeare,
Language, and Politics
Summer 83
Carey, James
Aristotle's Account of the
Intelligibility of Being ..... Winter 84
Carmichael, Joel
The Lost Continent, The
Conundrum of Christian
Origins . . . . .
Autumn/Winter 82-3
Collins, Arthur
Kant's Empiricism ............ Jul 79
The Scientific Background of
Descartes' Dualism·
..... Winter 81
Objectivity and Philosophical
Conversation: Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature, by Richard
Rorty (Review Essay) ...... Winter 82
The Unity of Leibniz's Thought on
Contingency, Possibility, and
Freedom
Autumn/Winter 82-3
Ambiguities in Kant's Treatment of
Space
.......... Winter/Spring 83
Collins, Linda
Going to See the Leaves
Autumn 81
(narrative)
....... .
A Nighttime Story
(narrative)
.. Autumn/Winter 82-3
Comber, Geoffrey
Conversations with Graduate Institute
Alumni
Apr 73
Comenetz, Michael
Chaos, Gauss, and Order
Jul 78
Darkey, William A.
In Memory of Mark Van
Doren
.........
Apr 73
Franz Plunder . . . . . .
. .. Jul 74
In Memoriam of John Gaw Meem
1895-1983 . . . . . .
. .... Winter 84
Dawson, Grace
A St. Johnnie on the Job
Apr 73
Market ....
Dean, John
Talking with ~i~tu;,es: "Les
Bandes Dessmees ..
. .Jul 79
74
Deane, Stephen
At Home and Abroad: Letter from
Moscow
............
Jul 80
de Grazia, Margreta
Nominal Autobiography in Shakespeare's
Sonnets
. . . . . . . . . . . . Summer 83
Dennison, George
Family Pages, Little Facts:
October (narrative) ....... Winter 81
Shawno (narrative)
Winter 82
Diamond, Martin
On The Study Of Politics In A
Liberal Education
Dec 71
Dorfman, Alan
Freud's "Dora''
... Jul 78
Doskow, George
Leven's Creator (book review) .... Jul 80
Drake, Stillman
Scientific Discovery, Logic,
and Luck . . . . . . .
. . . J ul 80
Dry, Murray
The Supreme Court and School
Desegregation: Brown vs. Board of
Education Reconsidered
Summer 83
Dulich, Jean (pseud.)
Letter from Vietnam
.. Winter 82
Fehl, Philipp P.
Life Beyond the Reach of
Hope . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... Jan 80
Ferrero, Guglielmo and Mosca, Gaetano
Letters on
Legitimacy . . . .
Winter/Spring 83
Fisher, Howard
The Great Electrical
Philosopher . . . . . . . . .
Jul 79
Flaumenhaft, Harvey
Memorial for Simon Kaplan
Jan 80
Fontaine, John
Chameleons (poem) . .
Winter 84
Ginsburg, David
Ideals and Action: Commencement
Address, Santa Fe, 1974
Jul 74
Gold, Michael W.
A Preservationist Looks at
Housing . . .
. .. Jan 78
Goldsmith, William M.
An Open Letter to St. John's
Alumni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jan 78
Goldwin, Robert A.
The First Annual Provocation
Address . . . . . . . . . .
. . . J ul 69
St. John's Asks John Locke Some
Questions . . .
Apr 71
Of Men and Angels: A Search for
Morality in the Constitution ... Jul 76
Gray, J. Glenn
The Sense of It All; Commencement
Address, Santa Fe 1977 ....... Jul 77
Griffin, Jonathan
Translation of Poetry (with Rim baud
translations)
.........
Apr 77
Guaspari, David
The Incompleteness Theory .. Autumn 81
Hadas, Rachel
Three Poems . .
Winter/Spring 83
Ham, Michael W.
Martin Duberman, Black Mountain
(book review) . . . . . . . .
Apr 73
Hazo, Robert G.
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service
........... Jan 79
Hilberg, Raul
At Home and Abroad: The Holocaust
Mission . . . . . . . Autumn/Winter 82-3
Himmelfarb, Gertrude
Adam Smith: Political Economy as
Moral Philosophy
Winter/Spring 83
Holmes, Stephen
Benjamin Constant on Ancient and
Modern Liberty .... Winter/Spring 83
Holt, Philip
Sophocles' Ajax and the Ajax
Summer 82
Myth
........ .
Hook, Sidney
Memories of John Dewey
Days ................ .
. Jan 80
Isaac, Rael Jean and Erich
The Media-Shield of the
Utopians . . . . . . . . . . Winter/Spring 83
Jacobsen, Bryce
"When is St. John's Going to
Resume Athletics?"
Apr 70
Jaffa, Harry V.
Inventing the Past . . . ... Autumn 81
Jenson, Kari
At Home and Abroad: Letter from
the Homefront: On
Marrying ...... Autumn/Winter 82-3
Jones, Gregory
On J ohnathan Schell's The Fate of the
Earth (Review Essay) . Winter/Spring 83
Josephs, Lawrence
Four Poems .............. Autumn 81
Io; Hephaestus (poems) .... Winter 82
Achilles; In Memoriam, John Downes
(poems) ....... Autumn/Winter 82-3
Kaplan, Simon
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service
.................. Jan 79
Kass, Amy Apfel
The Liberal Arts Movement: From
Ideas to Practice
Oct 73
Kieffer, John S.
Apr 69
A World I Never Made
lola Scofield, A Memorial
Jul 72
Klein, Jacob
Dec 69
The Problem of Freedom
A Giving of Accounts
Apr 70
(with Leo Strauss)
The Myth of Virgil's Aeneid
Dec 70
On Precision . . . .
Oct 71
Discussion As A Means Of Teaching
And Learning . . . . . . . . .
Dec 71
Speech, Its Strengths and Its
Weaknesses ....... .
Jul 73
Memorial to Leo Strauss
Jan 74
Plato's Phaedo ......... .
Jan 75
The Art of Questioning and the
Liberal Arts . . . . . . . . .
Jan 79
The Copernican Revolution .... Jan 79
On a Sixteenth Century
Algebraist
....... .
Jan 79
The World of Physics and the
Natural World (trans. and ed. D. R.
Lachterman) . . . .
Autumn 81
Kojeve, Alexandre
The Christian Origin of Modern Science
(trans. D. R. Lachterman) . Winter 84
Kuder, Samuel S.
Mathematics As A Liberal Art .. Jul 69
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service . . . . . . . . . . .
. .... Jan 79
SPRING 1984
�Laloy, Jean
John Paul II and the World of
Tomorrow
............. Jul 80,
Landau, Julie
Some Classical Poems of the T'ang
and Sung Dynasties . . . . . . . . . . J ul 79
Some Chinese Poems
Summer 82
Lazitch, Branko
Not Just Another Communist
Party: The Polish Communist
Party .......... Autumn/Winter 82-3
Lederer, Wolfgang
How Does One Cure A Soul? .. Apr 76
What Good and What Harm can
Psychoanalysis Do?
Winter 84
Le Gloannec, Anne-Marie
The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization or
Germanization? ....... .
Winter 82
Levin, Michael
Autumn 81
"Sexism" is Meaningless
Liben, Meyer
Three (Short Stories) .....
Jul 80
The Streets on which Herman
Melville Was Born and Died
(narrative)
. . Winter 81
Not Quite Alone on the Telephone
Summer 81
(narrative) . .
New Year's Eve; Treasure Hunt;
Meetings, Recognitions
(narratives) . .
Autumn/Winter 82-3
Littleton, Michael S.
Prayers ....... .
Jul 70
Loewenberg, Robert
The Trivialization of the Holocaust
as an Aspect of Modern
Idolatry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winter 82
That Graver Fire Bell: A
Reconsideration of the Debate over
Slavery from the Standpoint of
Lincoln
. . . . . . . . . . Summer 82
Marx's Sadism . . Autumn/Winter 82-3
Lund, Nelson
Guardian Politics in
The Deer Hunter . . . . . . . .
Winter 81
Sidney Hook, Philosophy and Public
Policy (book review)
Autumn 81
Macierowski, Edward M.
Truth and Rights ............. Jan 77
Mackey, Kimo
The Odyssey of the "Cresta"
Apr 75
Maschler, Chaninah
Gotthold Lessing: Ernst
and Falk, Conversations for
Freemasons
Autumn/Winter 82-3
Class Day Address 1983 ... Summer 83
McGrath, Hugh P.
An Address for the Rededication of
the Library
............... Dec 69
Michnik, Adam
Letter from a Polish
Prison . . . . .
Autumn/Winter 82-3
Mongardini, Carlo
Guglielmo Ferrero and
Legitimacy . . . . . . . . Winter/Spring 83
Montanelli, Indro
Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"... Winter 82
Morrisey, Will
DeGaulle's Le fil de l'epie .... Winter 81
Mosca, Gaetano
(See Ferrero, Guglielmo)
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Mullen, William
Nietzsche and the Classic ... Winter 82
N avrozov, Lev
One Day in the Life of the New York
Times and Prava in the World: Which
is more Informative? ..... Autumn 81
A Dead Man's Knowledge;
Varlam Shalamov, Graphite
(book review) . . . .
Winter 82
Updike and Roth: Are They Writers?
(Review Essay)
. . Summer 82
Neidorf, Robert A.
Biological Explanation
Apr 70
The Ontological Argument
Apr 72
Old Wars: Commencement Address,
Annapolis, 1972 ............. Jul 72
Statement of Educational Policy
and Program . . . . . . . . . .
. . jul 77
O'Flynn, Janet Christhilf
For Bert Thoms
. Jul 79
O'Grady, William
The Power of the Word in
Oedipus at Colonus . . . . . . . . .
Apr 77
About Jacob Klein's Books About Plato:
A Commentary on Plato's Meno and
Plato's Trilogy ................ Jan 79
Odysseus Among the Phaiakians jul 79
Ossorgin, Michael
"How Was the Seminar?"
Apr 69
Two Writings in the Sand; Santa Fe
Baccalaureate Address
Jul 74
Platt, Michael
Aristotle Gazing . . . . . ........ Jan 80
Prevost, Gary
Carrillo and the Communist Party in
Spain (book review)
.. Jan 80
Raditsa, Leo
Thucydides, Aristotle's Politics, and the
Significance of the Peloponnesian
War ........................ Jul 75
Words to the Class of 1977; Class Day
Address, Annapolis
........ J ul 77
For Bert Thoms
. . . . . . . . J ul 79
The Collapse of Democracy at Athens
and the Trial of Socrates ...... Jul 79
At Home and Abroad: Letter from
Budapest and Pees
... Jan 80
Eyes of His Own -and Words: George
Dennison, Oilers and Sweepers and Other
Stories (book review) . . . . . . . . . . J ul 80
Recent Events in the West .. Winter 81
Afghanistan Fights: The Struggle for
Afghanistan, by N arrey Peabody Newell
and Richard S. Newell (Review
Essay) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winter 82
Laos; Marie- Noele and Didier Sicard,
Au nom de Marx et de Bouddha, Revolution
au Laos; un peuple une culture
disparaissent ............... Winter 82
The Division of the West- and
Perception ......... Winter/Spring
Rangel, Carlos
The Latin-American Neurosis (trans.
Hugh P. McGrath, Leo
Raditsa) . . .
. . . . . . . . Winter
Roth, Robert
In the Audience (narrative) Summer
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Bach's Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jan
Profile of an Alumnus: David
Moss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Apr
83
81
81
75
76
Trial in Berlin . . . . . . .
Jan 77
German Resistance to Hitler: Elites and
Election
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . J ul 79
Student Rebellion and the Nazis: "The
White Rose" in Its Setting Winter 84
Sachs, Joe
Aristotle's Definition of Motion . Jan 76
An Outline of the Argument of
Aristotle's Metaphysics . . . . Summer 81
The Fury of Aeneas
Winter 82
Scofield, Richard
Dec 69
The Habit of Literature
Scolnicov, Samuel
Plato's Euthydemus
Jan 80
Simpson, Thomas K.
Faraday's Thoughts on Electromagnetism . . . .
Jul 70
Newton and the Liberal Arts ... Jan 76
"The Scientific Revolution Will Not
Take Place"
............ Jul 78
Prometheus Unbound
Jan 80
Slakey, Thomas J.
Sep 70
Personal Freedom
Toward Reading Thomas
Aquinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summer 82
Smith, ]. Winfree
The Teaching of Theology to
Undergraduates
Jul69
Commencement Address,
Annapolis, 1970
Jul 70
Aristotle's Ethics
Jan 73
Memorial to Leo Strauss
Jan 74
Commencement Address,
Annapolis, 1976
jul 76
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service . . . . .
. .... Jan 79
Memorial for Simon Kaplan ... jan 80
St. John's under Barr and
Buchanan
. . . . . . . . . . Summer 82
Smith, Brother Robert
Excerpts from the History of the Desert
Fathers
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Apr 76
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service . . . . . . . . . . .
. . Jan 79
Proof and Pascal . .
Winter 82
Sonnesyn, Patricia
For Bert Thoms .
Jul 79
Spaeth, Robert L.
An Interview with Barbara
Leonard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oct 72
Alumni Profile: John Poundstone Jan 73
An Interview with Robert Bart Apr 73
An Interview with Alvin Fross and
Peter Weiss . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jul 73
Profile: Louis L. Snyder, '28 ... Jul 73
Sparrow, Edward G.
Apr 71
Logic and Reason
Noun and Verb . . . . .
. . Jul 71
A Reading of the Parable of the
Prodigal Son .......... .
Jul 78
Storing, Herbert J.
The Founders and Slavery ..... Jul 76
Strauss, Leo
A Giving of Accounts
(with Jacob Klein) . . .
. . Apr 70
What is a Liberal Education? .. Jan 74
An Unspoken Prologue to a Public
Lecture at St. John's
Jan 79
Tamny, Martin
Boyle, Galileo, and Manifest
Experience ......... .
Jan 80
75
�Thaw, Eugene V.
The Collection of Mr. and Mrs.
Eugene V. Thaw
Apr 76
Thompson, Homer A.
The Libraries of Ancient
Ath.ens
Winter
Tolbert, James M.
Remarks at Ford K. Brown Memorial
Service
Oct 7 7
Twenty Years in Retrospect
Sep 69
Twenty- Five Years in
Retrospect
Oct 74
Van Doren, Mark
How to Praise A World That May
Not Last
Dec 71
Venable, Bruce
Philosophy and Spirituality in
Plotinus
Autumn 81
Wasserman, Adam
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
(book review) . .
Autumn 81
Webb, James
Mission over Hanoi (from A Country Such
as This) . .
Summer 83
Weigle, Mary Martha (Marta)
Brothers of Our Father Jesus-The
Penitentes of the Southwest .... Jul 75
Weigle, Richard D.
The Liberal Arts College: Anachronism
or Paradigm . .
. . . . . Sep 69
e1
76
Remarks at Ford K. Brown Memorial
Service
Oct 7 7
Report of the President
Sep 69, 70
Oct 71-80
Richard Daniel Weigle, Celebration
of an Anniversary . . . . . . . . . .. Jul 74
West, Thomas G.
Cicero's Teaching on Natural
Law . . . . . . . .
Summer 81
Williamson, Ray and Abigail
.... jul 74
Plastering Day
Wilson, Curtis A.
Reflection on the Idea of
Science
Dec 70
Apr 74
Jacob Klein at 75
Commencement Address,
Annapolis, 1977
Jul 77
Remarks at Ford K. Brown Memorial
Service
........ Oct 77
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service
... Jan 79
On the Discovery of Deductive
Science
Jan 80
Ancient Astronomy and Ptolemy's
"Crime" (book review) ........ Jan 80
Kepler and the Mode of Vision Jul 80
The Origins of Celestial Dynamics:
Kepler and Newton
Winter 81
Homo Loquens from a Biological
Standpoint
Summer 83
A Comment on Alexandre Kojfve's
"The Christian Origin of Modern
Science" . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Winter 84 ·
Winiarski, Barbara Dvorak
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service
Jan 79
Zelenka, Robert S.
The Ruin; Hommage a Dietrich
Buxtehude (poem) ........... Jan 75
BlackWf!ter (poem)
Summer 83
Zuckerman, Elliott
The Magic Fire and the Magic
Flute
........
Dec 69
What is the Question? . . . . .
Apr 73
Remarks at Jacob Klein Memorial
Service
.................. Jan 79
Don Alfonso
(poem)
Autumn/Winter 82-3
Black and White;.Arriv.ll; Sixteen
Eighteen; With Orjan at the
Great Japan Exhibition
(poems) . . . . .
Winter/Spring 83
Beyond the First Hundred Years: Some
Remarks on the Significance of
TriStan
Winter 84
Cordelia (poem)
Winter 84
SPRING 1984
��The St. John's Review
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Sterling, J. Walter
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Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Douglas
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Berg, Gretchen
Berman, Ronald
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THE
StJohn's Review
Editor:
J. Walter Sterling
Contents
Managing Editor:
2
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Susan Lord
22
Editorial Board:
Eva Brann
S. Richard Freis,
Student Rebellion and the Nazis: "The White
Rose" in its Setting
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
The Christian Origin of Modern Science
Alexandre Kojeve
26 ..... . A Comment on Alexandre Kojeve's "The
Christian Origin of Modern Science"
Curtis Wil>on
Alumni representative
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
Curtis A. Wilson
30
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems
are welcome, but should be accom~
panied by a stamped, self~addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned
comments are also welcome.
The St. John's Review (formerly The Callege) is published by the Office of the
Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
What Good and What Harm Can
Psychoanalysis Do?
TtOlfgang Lederer
39
Cordelia (Poem)
Elliott Zuckcrman
40
Aristotle's Account of the Intelligibility of Being
James Carey
51
Chameleons (Poem)
John Fontaine
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre,
President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the winter,
spring, and summer. For those not on
the distribution list, subscriptions:
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$36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address all correspondence to
The St. John's Rem'ew, St. John's College,
OccASIONAL DiscouRsEs
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
52
Intellect and Intuition
Eva Brann
Volume XXXV, Number 1
Winter 1984
59
Beyond the First Hundred Years: Some
Remarks on the Significance of Tristan
·Elliott Zuclrcrman
63
In Memoriam John Gaw Meem, 1895-1983
William A. Darkey
©
1984 St. John's College; All rights
reserved. Reproduction in whole or in
part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composition: Fishergate Publishing Co., Inc.
Printing: The John D Lucas Printing Co.
The kind permission
of Harper
& Raw to
use the pictures on pp. 3 and 12 is gratefully acknowledged.
ON THE COVER: Johannes Kepler; a portion of Kepler's Epitome of
Copernican Astronomy, translated by Charles Glenn Wallis; and an
image of the derivation of the number of the planets or orbits about
the sun from the five regular solid figures.
�ST. JoHN's REVIEW
Winter 1984
Student Rebellion and the Nazis:
"The White Rose" in Its Setting
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
I The Rise and Rule of Hitler
ere someone to ask why I am giving two
lectures in a row instead of the traditional
single lecture, I might give as a reason
an experience I had some two years ago.
It was in May 1970, just after the
American incursion into Cambodia, at a university
specializing in theology- one that had theology as one
of its three main divisions. There was student unrest all
over the country and talk of "revolution:' There was
something like that going on at that university on the
day I spoke there. My subject was the relationship of the
Nazis and the churches, a subject, I had been told, of
special interest to the people there.
But perhaps not on that disturbed day. The question
period was dismal; discussion impossible. One questioner
got up and asked: "What about student protest?" It was
not a sly question; it was quite innocent and proceeded
from pure ignorance, such ignorance as I was unprepared
for in a middle-aged questioner. So I gave a brief and
brutal answer on the history of student protest in Germany: that, indeed, loud and massive and effective protest existed in the period bifore the Nazis came to power,
and that the protesters Were Nazis, or at any rate militant nationalists, who exercised considerable pressure on
the academic establishment of the Weimar Republicand, incidentally, even more, on that of the Austrian
Republic; that once the Nazis were in power, there was
W
Beate Ruhm von Oppen is a tutor at St. Jolm's College, Annapolis. This article is a slightly revised version of two lectures given at Annapolis on February
18 and 25, 1972. Her publications include &li"gion and Resistance to Nazism,
(Princeton 1971); "Nazis and Christians" in "World Politics, vol. XXI, No. 3,
April 1969; and "Trial in Berlin" in The College, January 1977.
2
hardly any open protest; and that the first three of the
famous group of Munich students who protested in
"public" against the Nazi regime and its war were dead
within a few days of being caught, the rest following a
few months later.
A helpful colleague, a theologian and church
historian, then jumped into the breach and explained
that Nazi Germany was a police state- and what that
meant. I must confess I had taken that as read. But the
incident showed me that one cannot take it as read any
longer and that any description of resistance must start
with that which is resisted.
Also it could be that a term like "police state;' being
misused too much, has lost its meaning and like other
such terms ~'genocide;' for instance, or "fascism" or
"totalitarianism'~ no longer conveys anything precise or
distinct. But meanings and distinctions have to be kept
clear, or, if they have been blurred, have to be made clear
again, not just for love of pedantry, but for tbe sake of
liberty, perhaps of life itself.
Lies work best when there is a grain of truth in them.
The best precaution against being taken in is the cultivation of the habit of looking for tbat grain of truth and
trying to see what has been done with it. Denying or ignoring the grain of truth or the facts of a matter may
be magnificent ideology and rousing rhetoric, but that
is no defence against the better liar. And Hitler may have
been the best liar there ever was.
That is one reason why we are having two lectures,
the first on the police state or whatever other name one
may find more appropriate for Nazi Germany, and the
second on a group of students who opposed it and a professor who supported them and died with them.
I must take note of two elements of risk in offering
such lectures as these, here, at St. John's. Firstly, St. John's
does not do "history." It is not one of our liberal arts. We
WINTER 1984
�The ji'rst students to be executed. Lift
to right, Hans and Sophie Scholl,
Christoph Probst, july 1942.
read Homer and Herodotus and Thucydides; Virgil and
Tacitus; Plutarch and Gibbon; Tocqueville and Tolstoi
and Marx. We read quite a lot of political philosophy. We
read much that made history, from the Bible to the church
fathers to the reformers and debunkers; from Aristotle
to Rousseau and Kant to Hegel and Darwin to the
documents of American constitutional history. Yet we do
not have "history" as a subject, or a disipline.
The second risk is rather peculiar to our moment in
history, but here, at St. John's, it is probably the lesser
of the two risks. The temper of many of the more vocal,
more audible and visible of our contemporaries is ahistorical or anti-historical. There is no patience with
history. It is regarded as "irrelevanC-unless, of course,
disjointed bits of it can be used, torn from their context,
as ammunition in some campaign.
The two risks may, to some extent, cancel each other
out, although they may also reinforce each other. We
cultivate, perhaps over-cultivate, rationality here. By
"over-cultivate" I mean a development of the reasoning
faculty at the expense of other faculties. Here we stand
opposed to the temper of our time which is, increasingly,
anti-rational-a rebellion against the shallow "functional"
rationalism of the mechanised, mass-educating, manipulative age. Our rationalism here, at St. John's, is
different- more reflective and comprehensive- and
therefore few of us are driven into this reactive irrationalism, in fact most of us are quite good at resisting it.
But I often sense a divorce from reality, from human
reality; from psychological, political, historical reality. For
instance, seminar discussions of Thucydides on the
revolution in Corcyra and the attendant linguistic revolution in which "words had to change their usual meanings" tend to be perfunctory: a few contemporary examples of the misuse of words by dishonest politicians
or commercial salesmen will be mentioned, but the
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
discussion lacks feeling, passion -lacks, apparently, experience; I mean: lacks the qllfllity of talk about something
one has really experienced; it lacks the conviction that
this is something really evil and dangerous- and should
be resisted or counteracted to the best of our ability. The
raw material of experience abounds. But the mental, including the emotional, engagement rarely seems to take
place. I cannot here go into the question of what the
reasons for this inattention may be. Quantity of comment
on the phenomenon of misused language proves
nothing- certainly it does not prove a realization of the
seriousness of the matter.
Neither does a concern for the purity and impeccability of language necessarily ensure the best politics and
the most just and decent polity. But certain peccabilities
are more dangerous, more insidious in their effects, than
others. The more serious linguistic sins seem to me to
be very closely related to the subject at the core of these
two lectures: slavery and freedom, the manipulation of
men (and women, and children) and the resistance to
manipulation -a resistance that is needed at all times
and is always fraught with risks and renunciations, but
which in bad times may involve the readiness to stake
one's life.
fter this short introduction, let me begin in a most
simple way and speak of the ways in which politics began to impinge on me at the time when
things were bad and getting worse. For the students I
am going to talk about were roughly speaking my contemporaries, my vintage, belonging to the same "cohort;'
as I believe the trade now calls it. 1 We were born at the
end of the first World War and did our growing up in
Germany.
I cannot think back to a time when politics was not
in the air. I remember the evidence of food shortages in
A
3
�my kindergarten and elementary school days. I
remember the feeling of insecurity communicated by all
around me when the currency collapsed, that is, when
there was not just the sort of inflation we have now, but
something that galloped away in geometric or exponential progression, so that, for instance, a lawyer's or doctor's earnings of one day might not be enough to buy
a loaf of bread the next day.
Some time ago you could see, in the window of an
antique shop on our Main Street, an old German 50,000
Mark note, said to have been "used in Hitler's Germany."
Perhaps it was used as wall-paper. It might be more accurate to say that it was used- as monry- in pre- Hitler
Germany, though I'd hate to refer to tbe Weimar
Republic as just that. At any rate it was a specimen of
the kind of money that helped to bring about Hitler's
Germany.
50,000 Marks now would be worth about $13,000. In
"normal" times, 4 marks were a dollar. The date of issue
on that 50,000 Mark note was 19 November 1922. The
very fact that such a note was printed and put into circulation was, of course, a sign that inflation had got out
of hand. In the summer of 1922 the dollar was worth not
4 Marks, but over 100. The next S).lmmer it was worth
over 1 million. And by 15 November 1923 it was worth
4 trillion Marks ( 4,000,000,000,000). If my reckoning is
right- but you'd better check it-that 50,000 Mark note
issued November 1922 was worth one-eighty-millionth
of a dollar a year: $1/80,000,000 or 1/800,000 of a cent.
That was very cheap wallpaper. But expensive too.
What it all meant, among other things, was the
pauperization and demoralization of the middle class and
the partial destruction of the social fabric.
It was in November 1923 that Adolf Hitler, the leader
of a tiny party, staged his abortive putsch or coup d~tat in
Munich, when he tried for the first time, and failed, to
seize power. That year had also seen, in central Germany,
communist attempts to seize power; they too were unsuccessful. Hitler was sent to a comfortable prison for
a while and used his leisure to write his book, Mein Kampf.
When he got out again, he adopted a policy of legality
and with that he eventually prevailed.
By the time I entered elementary school, in 1924, a
new currency had been established and, though scarce,
money once more was money. But I noticed that my
teachers were not enthusiastic about the political system,
though we dutifully and decorously celebrated the 80th
birthday of our President. His name was Hindenburg
and he had been a famous field marshal in the world war,
halting the Russian advance in East Prussia. Being, as
it were, a personal link between the old, pre-war empire
and the new, post-war republic, and loyal to the new constitution, he was a national figure acceptable to the
moderate right and moderate left. And for a decade he
lasted as head of state, while chancellors, or heads of
government, succeeded each other at a breathtaking rate.
The country had many political parties and an election
system based on proportional representation, so that votes
were distributed across a wide spectrum and a large
number of parties; thus governments had to be formed
4
out of coalitions of several parties and were correspondingly shaky and shortlived. I also remember many elections during my school days and reports of violent
rhetoric from left and right, as well as physical violence,
street fights, murders, assassinations.
Then, after the Wall Street crash of 1929 with its
world-wide repercussions, there was another economic
crisis a mere- six years after the beginning of the recovery
from the earlier one, with a growing, an intolerable, rate
of unemployment. It grew from 1.3 million in September
1929 to 3 million a year later, to over 6 million in 1931.
With a total population of about 65 million, this meant
that one in every two families was hit; and unemployment pay was at starvation level. The extremist parties,
the communists and the Nazis, made great gains and
finally occupied more than half the seats in the national
parliament, where they were now able to paralyze the
democratic process. They also joined, for instance, in a
strike to paralyze the transport system of Berlin. Otherwise they could fight each other to the death, and did,
with casualties on both sides, despite the general strategy
of the communists at that time to treat the Social
Democrats -whom they called "social fascists" for the
purpose-as the enemy No. 1 and to flirt with the
possibility of a Nazi victory as a promising prelude to
a communist takover. Even a school girl couldn't help
noticing some of these things: the transport strike, the
posters, the polarization, the combination of both extremes against the middle, and the weakness and apparent helplessness of the middle.
When President Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reich
Chancellor on 30 January 1933, he was acting in accordance with the letter and perhaps even the spirit of the
constitution. Hitler's party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (or "Nazis" for short, to distinguish
them from the "Sozis;' or Social Democrats), was by then
the strongest party in the country, with about one-third
of the vote; tbe Social Democrats had only one-fifth; the
communists one-sixth; the Catholic Center Party,
together with its Bavarian affiliate, about tbe same. There
were many others, but not one of them had as much as
10% of the vote: the largest of them, the Nationalists,
8.8%. Hitler became the head of a coalition government.
I still remember seeing the faces of these gentlemen in
an evening paper that carried the announcement.
No one knew what it meant. I was somewhat scared,
for I had read Hitler's book. I had had to do it secretly,
at night, with a flashlight under the bedclothes, for my
parents, like many other respectable people, regarded it
as pornographic. It was very long; and that was probably
why very few people read it, though once its author had
become the ruler of the land, it was widely and
compulsorily distributed, for example, as a present to
newly-weds, bound like a bible. But that did not, of
;::ourse, ensure its perusal.
Life at school greatly changed in the seventeen
months before I left. There was much talk of national
solidarity and the Community of the People. There were
changes in personnel and in the curriculum. And there
was a dramatic rate of attrition. My own class was reduc-
WINTER t984
�ed by more than half- probably because girls (it was a
girls' school I went to) or their parents thought that since
the new regime had set its face against too much
academic education for women (who were not to exceed
10% of university enrollment), it was hardly worth struggling through more Latin and trigonometry and all that
up to the rather stiff final exam which was normally taken
at eighteen.
The teaching personnel changed in two ways: there
were a few dismissals, of] ews- there were very few Jews
at my school. Our English teacher, who was a Jew, was
at first said not to be subject to dismissal because he had
not only served in the war but had even been wounded
in the head; but eventually he left all the same and the
next English teacher was less good; and that one was in
due course replaced by an even worse one, a teacher
trainee. The other change among the teachers ·was a
change of tone and colour. A very few revealed themselves
as Nazis which, they said, they had been all along but
could only now, at last, openly avow to be. (On the whole
the school had been vaguely nationalistic, but far from
Nazi.) Others toed the new line as best they could and
exhibited varying degrees of cravenness or caution or
dignity, enthusiasm or moderation or reserve. Many new
things were required; the Hitler salute at the beginning
of classes, attendance at new national celebrations which
proliferated and at which one had, of course, to stand
at attention (with upraised arm) as the new national anthem was played and sung, the old marching song of the
Nazi movement, with text by one Horst Wessel, saying:
"Raise the flag, close the ranks, we stormtroopers march
in firm and steady tread. Comrades shot by the Reds
and Reactionaries are marching on in our ranks." It was
the battle song of the new revolution.
So there was all that. And there were changes in such
subjects as history and science. Let me take biology, for
that is where I had my brief hour of glory. I had not done
well with the dissection of tulips and the like. But I shone
once biology was converted into race biology. Not only
was there Mendel's law, about which my father had told
me before (only its implications and application were now
rather different from what I had gathered from him),
but, and this is where the real-if sinister- fun came
in, we now learnt about the German races ~'Aryan;' of
course, all of them. There were six, if I remember correctly, ranging in excellence from the Nordic to the East
Baltic. Nordic was the best because Nordic man had
created almost all the culture there was and he had qualities of leadership. The Mediterranean race was also quite
good (for after all there had been ancient Greeks and
Romans and there were modern Italians, good fascists,
full of leadership). The Mediterranean race could most
easily be memorized as a smaller, lightweight, and darker
version of the Nordic: what they had in common were
the proportions of their skulls and faces (long, narrow
skull, long face) and the characteristic way of standing
on one leg, with no weight on the other; one standing
and one playing leg, as a literal translation of the German names for them would have it. Such legs could be
seen in Greek statues and such were the legs of Nordic
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
man. The Falic race was the next best. It shared many
of the sterling qualities of the Nordic- highmindedness
and the rest- but could be distinguished from it by the
fact that it stood, squarely, on two legs. No playleg there.
Also its face was a bit broader. That race lacked,
somewhat, the fire of Nordic man, or let us say the thumos,
but made up for it by solidity and staying power. The
colour scheme was fairly nordic: blond hair, blue eyes.
So was that of the East Baltic race whose virtues were less
marked than those of the Nordic and the Falic and whose
features were less distinguished, including a broader skull
and a broadish nose. I could not quite make out the use
of this race, unless it was, perhaps, territorial, to keep
the Slavs out. The Slavs were not a German race. Then
there was a German race that looked, one might say, a
bit Jewish, or perhaps Armenian, but it was neither. It
was Dinaric and seemed to be much the same as What
earlier classifications had called Alpine. Indeed this race
dwelt in the mountains. It looked sturdy enough, but not
as prepossessing as the Nordic; and its head had awkward
measurements: Dinaric man had a prominent nose and
not much back to his head. But he had a redeeming
feature: he was musical.
Now all this, of course, was good clean fun and easy
to visualize and memorize. Indeed there were visual aids:
pictures of well-known personages to help recognition and
memorization: Hindenburg for the Falic race, somebody
like Haydn for the Dinaric, Caesar for the Mediterranean. Then there was a picture of Martin Luther, the
Great German Reformer; I forget what race he was said
to represent. To me he looked Slavic. But that, of course,
could not be. I suppose he was declared a darker type
of East Baltic or Falic. All this was child's play, and this
child played it with zest and success.
History was harder. One could not inwardly laugh
that off and outwardly play it as a parlor game. One had
to learn, or appear to learn; appear to make one's own- to
some extent, in some way, at least- one had to read, say,
and write the things that had been neglected or "falsified"
in the Weimar Republic of evil memory, under "the
System" ("in der Systemzeit/' as the Nazis referred to it).
New textbooks could not be brought out overnight. So
we were all given a short brochure on contemporary
history, the recent and most "relevant" period of German
and European and world history. It started with the German surrender at the end of the world war (there was
only one then, so it needed no number), a surrender
brought about by trickery abroad and treason at home,
by President Wilson's 14-point peace proposal and the
stab in the back of the undefeated German army, a piece
of treachery committed by Jews, Marxists, and
Catholics-feckless folk, with international ties. These
traitors then set up their system of abject surrender
abroad and iniquity and immorality at home. They accepted the shameful peace treaty of Versailles which not
only saddled Germany with sole responsibility for the
war (in Article 231, which Germans called the "war guilt
clause" or "war guilt lie") 2 but also provided for the
payment-virtually in perpetuity-of quite crippling
reparations. Germany was unilaterally disarmed (whereas
5
�Wilson had envisaged universal disarmament) and was
blockaded by the British- after the cessation of
hostilities-to enforce submission, and then, in 1923, invaded by the French, who marched into the Ruhr valley
to seize German coal and steel production as reparation
payments were in arrears. It was reparations that caused
the economic misery during the republican 14 years of
shame. Attempts to revise the reparations schedule to
make it more tolerable were fruitless and fraudulent. The
last revision provided for the spreading of payments until
1988 and the country was dying in the attempt to do the
victors' bidding. The nation would have to stand together
and rally round the FUhrer- or the "People's Chancellor;'
as he was then still called- to throw off the shackles of
Versailles. The cover of this brochure had a muscular
worker on it, stripped to the waist and bursting his chains.
We also learnt about the parts of Germany that had
been taken away by the Treaty of Versailles, that dictated
peace, and about the Germans who languished under
foreign domination. We learnt that German defencelessness was further aggravated by the geographic position
of the country: surrounded by hostile powers. Thus a
bombing plane could take off from France and fly right
across Germany and land in Czechoslovakia, without
refueling. The lesson was brought home by air raid exercises. They were not very realistic, but they served to
educate. I still remember leading my little troop of
classmates to their several homes, staying close to the
houses, as instructed, to avoid exposure to imagined falling shrapnel and flying glass. That was in the first year
or so of Hitler's power, five or six years before his war.
It was useless, of course, as an exercise in air raid precautions; but it was useful for fomenting fear and a spirit
of national defence. It also showed that the Czechoslovak
Republic, even if militarily it amounted to no more than
a well-defended aircraft base, was the power that enabled
France- or planes based in France- to bomb the whole
of Germany. And in addition- but this point was not
given too much prominence until four years later, in the
crisis leading up to the Munich settlement which began
the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia- in addition the
country was a political entity in which six-and-a-half
million Czechs held over three million Germans in subjection, as second-class citizens. Clearly the Sudeten
region had to be united with Germany.
So much for what was taught in class and done in
extra-curricular exercises under the responsibility of the
school. But there was one other thing I should mention.
Schools were obliged to take their pupils to certain films,
propaganda films that were being shown commercially.
So, obediently, our class went to see the movie "Bitlerjunge Quex;' the story of a Hitler Youth of the working
class whose father was a communist and whose mother
was long-suffering and tried to cope with conditions and
her husband, but in the end committed suicide, by gas,
from misery and despair. Quex (who was a very idealized version of an actual Hitler Youth who had been
killed) first joined a communist youth group, as was
natural in view of his home background. But soon, on
a camping excursion, he was so revolted by their beastly
6
ways, that he ran away, ran through the woods, and carne
upon the camp of a Nazi youth group which instantly
and deeply impressed him as his own and the country's
salvation. (It was a sunrise scene, to make sure we all
got the point.) Here were shining faces, clean limbs, real
comradeship, purpose, discipline, dedication, and hope.
So he joined the Hitler Youth and was active, devotedly
active, in the distribution ofleaflets and all that; mostly
in the poor parts of Berlin that were hard hit by
unemployment-as much as the boy's own father. One
day, at dawn, the communists took their revenge and his
particular personal enemy, a brute of a man, pursued
him through the deserted streets -also through the maze
of an amusement park, a very effective, macabre,
cinematic touch that, and long before The Third Manand finally caught up with him and knifed him. But Quex
died for the cause, and when his friends found him, on
the point of death, and propped him up, he raised his
right arm in a salute to the German future and the
camera swung up to the clouds and the sound track into
the marching song of Hitler Youth, with the lines "the
flag leads us into eternity, for the flag is more than death:'
The trouble was twofold: that the film was most effective and affecting (however corny it may sound as I
now tell it) and made with terrific competence and with
the participation of some very good actors; and secondly
that the school was under an obligation not only to take
us to it, but also to discuss it with us. So we had our
class discussion. I do not remember much about it except for the fact that I decided to play the part of aesthetic
and dramatic critic, arguing that, powerful though the
movie was, it could have been even better if it had been
less black and white (metaphorically speaking), if it had
had more nuances, more human diversity and
verisimilitude. Why did I take that line? In order not to
embarrass or endanger our teacher who was leading the
discussion, who, I had reason to believe, was very
unhappy about the Nazis, and who was a widow with
two children for whom she had to provide.
Then there was a film about Joan of Arc, replete with
horrors of the Hundred Years' War. It exposed the sadism
of the British and the brutality of the Catholic clergy.
On that occasion I objected to the screening of atrocities;
and that was about as far as one could go and get away
with it.
Soon after, in the second half of 1934, I got out of
the country and cannot speak any further from personal
experience about what subsequently became possible and
impossible.
Now "impossible" is a term that strictly speaking
brooks no comparison. So let us look at some of the laws
that existed and were passed later, which limited the
freedom of expression and of assembly and of organization and action. Whatever laws may exist, and be enforced, it is, of course, still possible to do some of the
things that are forbidden; but it becomes less likely that
people will do them when the penalties are painful.
In a police state they really are inflicted. Actually, Nazi
Germany became something even worse than a police
state; because Hitler's shock troops, the SS, not only
WINTER 1984
�permeated and took charge of the police, but came to
have a whole empire and fields of activity to themselves,
outside the reach and control of the police and the army. It was the SS that ran the concentration camps and
extermination camps and the campaign to improve the
health of the nation (or the national economy) by killing the incurable. They were not hampered by the law
but acted directly on the Fuhrer's Orders, something
beyond the law.
B
ut I am anticipating. Let me mention some of
the early laws that were passed and enforced.
The first and most fundamental of them was the
Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the
People and the State. It was promulgated on 28 February
1933, four weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor and
the day after the burning of the Reichstag building by
arson. A young-Dutch anarchist boasted of the deed and
was eventually sentenced to death by the Supreme Court.
Ostensibly the decree was directed against communist
acts of violence. In fact it was used against all who could
be said to be endangering the State, including, for instance, members of the clergy who made bold to continue to preach and practise Christianity. It not only
tightened up provisions or increased penalties under the
criminal code for such offences as treason, arson, the use
of explosives, and the taking of hostages. But it also
suspended "until further notice" a number of basic
rights -and it remained in effect until the end of Hitler's
rule.
Three weeks later, on 21 March 1933, there was a
Decree "for the defence of the government of national
resurgence [Erhebung] against malicious attacks:' 3
What the word Erhebung in the title meant and the
text of the decree spelt out was that this protection of
the law was not only for the government but also for the
"organizations supporting it:' It was the protection of
government and party organizations against "malice'~
and "malice" was construed to include factual statements
that were false or distorted. This decree was very effective in silencing criticism.
The Nazis even tried to silence foreign criticismand to some extent succeeded. They had means of
pressure and persuasion even abroad. They had hostages
at home- for instance the half million German Jews. The
one-day boycott ofJewish shops and businesses on 1 April
1933 was presented as an act of retaliation and warning
against Jewish-instigated atrocity propaganda abroadwhere sensationalism had, indeed, occasionally got the
better of factual reporting. (The more serious consequence of irresponsible reporting was that later true
reports of massive horrors met with disbelief.)
On 24 March 1933 there was the Enabling Bill, passed
by parliament and limiting its rights in favor of the executive. This was the "Law to alleviate the distress of the
People and the State:' I am translating the title of the
law as best I can- though the German word "Not,') here
rendered as "distress" or perhaps I should say "plight?",
is another of those many-facetted and multi-level German words, with meanings ranging from "misery" to
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
11
emergency." (I won't here go into Wagner's use of the
word.) This Behebung (literally: lifting; or alleviation)
Behebung der Not von Volk und Staat demanded strong
measures and the government's hand was to be
strengthened against potential paralysis by parliament.
There were still parties in that parliament, though the
communists, after having done quite well in the elections
of 5 March, were prevented from taking their seats. These
elections, now far from free though they were, still only
gave the Nazis 44% of the vote. But by mid ;July all other
parties were abolished. (It may have had symbolic
significance that the "Law against the formation of new
parties;' the law instituting the one-party state, was pro-
mulgated on 14 July 1933. On the same day there was
a law on plebiscites, which could now be coupled with
elections. The one-party rule was further buttressed by
a law, of 1 December 1933, "to safeguard the unity of
party and State:')
Meanwhile there were also certain administrative
measures and reorganizations. There was something
called Gleichschaltung-a term taken from mechanics or
electro-mechanics and meaning synchronization or co-
ordination, or bringing into line. Gleichschaltung was applied to constitutional and administrative streamlining,
as in the laws of March and April 1933, for the
Gleichschaltung der Lander mit dem Reich, that is, the coordination of the Liinder, or States, with the Reich, or
national government and administration. It was aimed
at centralization and the weakening or abolition of powers
enjoyed by the states constituting Bismarck's Reich and
the Weimar Republic.
Perhaps I should add another word to our glossary:
Reich. It means realm or kingdom or empire. The Holy
Roman Empire was, in German, Das Heil£ge ROmische
Reich. It was fmally and officially abolished by Napoleon,
in 1806. When Bismarck united Germany in 1871, he
founded the second German Reich, or empire. The official name of the Weimar Republic was also Deutsches
Reich, but the Nazis did not count that and adopted the
name Third Reich to describe their own- though not
officially- in _international discourse.
But Reich, as I said, could also mean "kingdom;' as
in Reich Gottes "the kingdom of God"-and it was this overtone that Hitler played on when, at his first big public
appearance after his inauguration as Reich Chancellor,
officially, in international discourse.
his faith in the German people and the resurrection of
the nation and "the new German Reich of greatness and
honour and power and glory and righteousness. Amen."4
Yes, he said: "Amen:' It was an allusion to, and a secular
usurpation of, the Prostestant ending of the Lord's
prayer. 5 Hitler, a lasped Catholic, probably thought
references to national resurrection and invocations of
power and glory (of the German Reich, not the Reich
Gottes) would appeal to the Protestant majority of the
country-which was much more nationalist than the
Catholics- and whose support he needed. In fact his
main support and electoral base was predominantly
Protestant.
But to return to Gleichschaltung for a moment: it was
7
�not only Liinder that were being coordinated with the
Reich, but other organizations were also brought into
line, and the term was also used for the change or alignment of orientation or thinking, certainly of all expression
of thinking (though this meaning was not in official use,
only unofficial; it often cropped up in private comment
by critics of the regime). Not only were laws passed for
the rigid control of all cultural activities and the press
and radio, not only was there a law against "malice;' but
all language became subject to "regulation'~ explicit in
the ministries and in instructions to editors, but conveyed
quite clearly by implication to the general public too. This
Sprachregelung was extremely effective and of a thoroughness now almost unimaginable. Even George Orwell can
hardly give one an idea of the pervasiveness of it or of
the feel of a linguistic universe in which things could no
longer be called by their proper names. This was why
all forms of non-verbal communication became so very
important. Let me give you two examples to illustrate
this.
Let us take the word "murder:' It was taboo for actions of the government. When, in the bloody purge of
the summer of 1934, the Nazis murdered Erich
Klausener, the Berlin head of Catholic Action, they announced it as suicide. (Mr. Klein recently gave me the
issue of the paper of the Diocese of Berlin reporting
Klausener's death. 6 He evidently got hold of it at the time
of those turbulent events and kept it for nearly half a century.) The front cover is occupied by Klausener's picture
under the title of the paper and the Diocesan emblem,
a lamb, with the inscription "Behold the Lamb of God;'
in Latin. On the next page there is the announcement
of his unexpected death on 30 June 1934 (and everyone
knew the meaning of that date), the requiem mass for
him in the presence of the Bishop and all the members
of the chapter of the Cathedral of St. Hedwig, an address by the Bishop, and the burial of the ashes(ashes)-with all liturgical observances, in consecrated
ground. The page after that carries the Bishop's last salute
to the deceased, and then there are five more pages of
obituaries. Not a word about murder. Not a word about
suicide. But the fact that the ashes-the Nazis had
evidently thought it wiser to cremate the body-were
given Christian burial and that the funeral was a great
event in the Catholic diaspora of Berlin, gave the lie to
the Nazi version of his death. But such publicity was not
to be possible much longer.
Ten years and many unnatural deaths later, after the
failure of the attempt of 20 July 1944 to kill Hitler and
oust the Nazis, there were several series of secret show
trials of the conspirators. This may be a contradiction
in terms, but I can explain: admission to the trials and
reports on them were completely controlled. The "show"
aspect is harder to explain, but it was real enough: those
trials were filmed and the film was intended to be shown
after suitable editing. Very little of it survives after editing
by Goebbels and the victorious Allies. The most moving moment in what those two sets of censors and the
vicissitudes of war have spared is almost, but not quite,
wordless. It comes in a sequence when one of the accused,
8
in order to explain why he took part in the conspiracy,
referred to "the many murders'!...-. only to be instantly interrupted in mid-sentence, by the presiding judge, yelling, with pretended incredulity (or perhaps he could
really not believe his ears); "Murders?", and then subjecting him to screaming abuse and asking whether he
was not breaking down under the weight of his villainy.
The accused, as far as I could tell from the film, wanted
to treat this as a rhetorical question; but when the judge
insisted on an answer, yes or no, paused for a moment
and then, quietly, said: "No:' After which there was further loud invective from the judge. 7 The defendant was
sentenced to death and hanged. Many were sentenced
to death in those trials. But very few were able to say
anything so clear and unsettling to the regime as this man
with his explicit mention of murders and his final No.
What gave it its force was the moment of reflection before.
It made his final, considered, monosyllabic rejection of
what he had staked his life to fight deliberate and
definitive.
Such, then, was this careful regulation of language,
in addition to the laws circumscribing people's freedom
of action and of expression.
All the laws I have mentioned were enacted in Hitler's
first year of power. I shall just mention a few that came
later. President Hindenburg finally died, having been
very doddery before, in early August 1934. On 1 August
1934, a law concerning the office of Head of State had
been adopted, uniting the offices of President and
Chancellor. Hitler now had them both. He instantly
ordered a new oath to be administered to the armed
forces, sworn personally to the new Commander-inChief, "the Fuhrer of the German Reich and People,
Adolf Hitler." In March 1935 there was an armed forces
law, introducing conscription. The Treaty Of Versailles
had limited the size ofthe German army to 100,000 men
and stipulated long periods of service in order to prevent the training oflarge numbers of short-term recruits.
It was that small and highly professional army which now
served as nucleus of the new.
In September of that same year, 1935, the so-called
Niirnberg Laws were passed by the Reichstag which was
meeting not in Berlin but in the city where the annual
party rallies were held. These laws, one relating to citizenship and one to the Protection of German Blood and
Honour (this was the wording of the title), deprived Jews
of certain civil and social rights, including the right to
marry anyone but Jews or to have extramarital intercourse with gentiles. Jews (and other undesirables) had
already been eliminated from the civil service by the law
for the "restoration of the professional civil service" passed
in April 1933. By the way: in 1935 it was still possible
for Jews to leave the country. But there was the problem
of where to go and how to find a livelihood. This may
illustrate it: the American immigration quota for Germany was not fully taken up until1938. After the pogrom
of November 1938, that German quota had a waiting
list. Professional discrimination and economic disabilities
had been increasing before, but it was only the excesses
of November 1938- staged after the fatal shooting of a
WINTER 1984
�German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish jew-that
made it clear that worse might be in store. There was
a policy of mounting discrimination, then of segregation
and spoliation, finally, during the war, of deportation to
the East, and of extermination. But that was not promulgated in a law. On the contrary, it was a state secret
and carried out administratively. Most of the victims of
that last phase were not German Jews, but Polish, Russian, and other ] ews from all over Hitler's Europe.
he expansion of the Reich began with the annexation of Austria in March 1938 and the law
bearing the curious title "Law on the Reunification of Austria with the Reich:' What was being united
was the country of Hitler's birth and the country he
adopted and which adopted him with such catastrophic
consequences for itself and for the world. Hitler actually became a German citizen less than a year before he
became German Chancellor. The dodge to get him naturalized was his appointment by some of his sympathizers and purely on paper, of course, as a civil servant of the little state of Brunswick, in order to enable
him to run in the Presidential election of March 1932,
a few days later. The American constitution seems a bit
more careful in that respect.
There were many Austrians and many Germans who
wanted the Anschluss, the joining of the two countries.
But the peace treaties after the world war forbade it.
Many liberals had wanted it; but perhaps the conditions
of 1938 were not the most propitious. Propitious or no,
they brought about the Greater German Reich (as
distinct from Bismarck's Lesser Germany that had excluded Austria) and a flanking threat to Czechoslovakia.
Indeed, that country was dismembered a few months
after.
All this happened in a state of peace. The state of
war did not come about until September 1939 when
Hitler, having made a pact with Stalin, marched into
Poland, without a declaration of war, but "returning
[Polish] fire;' as the official German communique had
it. Poland was subdued and partitioned between the Germans and the Russians. France fell the following summer, after neutral Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium,
and Luxembourg. That was the stage at which Hitler's
ally Mussolinijoined in. Hitler failed to invade Britain,
but instead invaded Russia in June 1941. Japan and
America enter the war in December of that year, over
two years after its beginning. It did not end in Europe
until the Americans and the Russians met in the middle
of Germany in May 1945, and in Asia until two atom
bombs had been dropped on Japan, in August 1945.
Hitler's strongest card had been the Treaty of Versailles. His initial strength and his support in the period
of consolidation of power came from the German sense
of national injury and the real grievances. So long as he
was juSt seen as the man who was working, by hook or
by crook, for the revision or abolition of that treaty, he
had support for his foreign policy far beyond the ranks
of his own party. People were willing to swallow some
of the more distasteful components of his domestic policy
T
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for the sake of the liberation of the country from the
shackles of Versailles.
The first move in that direction came during Hitler's
first year in power, in October 1933, when he took Germany out of the League of Nations as a protest against
continued discrimination against Germany in the disarmament negotiations. He got this step endorsed by a
plebiscite combined with new elections- only one party
Eow to choose from- and the result was indeed more
favourable than the 44% of the previous March, more
than twice as good. Before the voting, to show the people and the world that Hitler had the backing of the
greatest sages in the land and of the academic establishment, there were declarations of support (entitled,
{'Bekenntnisse/J or confessions of faith) from representatives
of that establishment, including, for instance, the
theologian Hirsch at Gottingen and the philosopher
Heidegger at Freiburg, both Rectors of their universities. 8
The declarations were enthusiastic, bombastic, and
nauseating. The language in which they were couched
was very German and virtually untranslatable. It
represents the linguistic abdication of political responsibility and the intoxication with high-sounding and
meaningless words; the use of language not in an attempt
to get at the truth of a political matter, but to glorify the
winds of change or the march of history or the
peoplehood of a people or the leadership of such a leader.
Done by a Heidegger in quasi heideggerian German, it
is a bad thing.
But Heidegger soon relented; he may even have
repented. As Ernst Nolte, one of his students later turned
historian and a great authority on fascism, put it in an
essay on the types of behaviour among academic teachers
in the Third Reich: "It was not long before Heidegger,
with his turn to Holderlin, joined the widespread tenency to retreat from the National Socialist reality ... :' 9
Nolte, incidentally, does not think that Heidegger was
so lamentably subject to the prevailing mental climate
because of his philosophy. He does not consider the
possibility, which I regard as a probability, that Heidegger's lack of mental resistance may have been due to his
relationship with language. It is my feeling- however
paradoxical it may sound when it is said about a philosopher endowed with so subtle an ear for the vibrations
of words- that it must have been his politico-linguistic
tin ear that failed to warn him of people who spoke
Hitler's language. And he had not read Mein Kampf
And the students? One hesitates to generalize, but
they were, on the whole, well ahead of the general
development, in the vanguard. Nazi students had taken
the lead and won the votes in the elections to student
organizations long before Hitler seized power and Professor Heidegger said: "Let not theses and ideas be the
rules of your being! The Fuhrer himself and he alone
is the German reality and law, today and in the future:' 10
1b some extent it is true to say that 11 N ational Socialism
came to power as the party of youth." 11 But it is not the
whole truth.
For this Hirsch-Heidegger syndrome was, unfortunately, significant and fairly widespread. Yet Nazi stu-
9
�dent activism not only followed and accompanied, but
preceded it. Youth was in the vanguard of the Nazi movement and revolution. Also the average age of the representatives and leaders of that party was well below that of
other parties, a fact from which the Social Democrats,
in particular, suffered acutely. They lacked dynamism;
the Nazis had it.
II The Case of the White Rose
he student organizations were captured by Nazi
activists long before Hitler and his party captured
the chancellorship and command posts of the
country and established a police state, or rather something even beyond a police state. What I call the "HirschHeidegger syndrome;' was an intoxication, a passing intoxication, perhaps, certainly so in the case of Heidegger, but none the less real and productive of real consequences at tbe time. In Heidegger's case I have suggested
that the loss of sobriety may have been due to the patient's relationship with language, that is, not with his
philosophy, but with his failure to test words for their
meaning and implication when used in the political
context.
The appeals by prominent representatives of the
academic establishment to the German electorate to vote
for Hitler after his first significant step in foreign affairs,
leaving the League of Nations, were printed and
translated and also disseminated abroad as Bekenntnisse,
confessions of faith, in the new Germany and its leader
Adolf Hitler.
Let me quote you the official preface to this collection of "confessions" by leading academics. I shall quote
it in the official translation, for that, after all, was what
the wider world read. The translation is a bit funny, but
I shall then say roughly what it meant. It was headed
"An Appeal to the Intelligentsia of the World" 12 and it
began:
T
All science is inextricably linked with the mental character of
the nation whence it arises. The stipulation for the successful
scientific work, is, therefore, an unlimited scope of mental
development and the cultural freedom of the nations. Only
from the co-operation of the scientific culture of all nationssuch as is born from and peculiar to each individual nationthere will spring the nation-uniting power of science. Unlimited
mental development and cultural freedom of the nations can
only thrive on the basis of equal rights, equal honour, equal
political freedom, that is to say, in an atmosphere of genuine,
universal peace. On the basis of this conviction German science
appeals to the intelligentsia of the whole world to cede their
understanding to the striving German nation- united by Adolf
Hitler- for freedom, honour, justice and peace, to the same
extent as they would for their own. 1 3
There are troubles with the translation of this entire
document, of course. It is not very English. For "science;'
for instance, read scholarship, or learning. For other
words it is harder to substitute English equivalents, for
in some cases there are none. The German original of what
became the "mental character of the nation" was
10
something called "geistige Art des U!lk£s," and that bristles
with difficulties and booby-traps. Not only because the
word %lk" had on the one hand its denotation of "people"
(and there was and is no other word for that except in
a few contexts, such as U!lkslied, where "folk" will do),
on the other hand it had connotations of"race." But also
a once harmless word like ~~rt," meaning "kind" (or
perhaps even "character" as the official translation put
it) had ceased being harmless and now had a racial overtone as well, a matter later made quite clear in racial
legislation which used the term 1&rtfremd," or alien, to refer
to alien blood
But the gentle reader abroad could not know this and
was probably no more than slightly bemused by the
language served up to him in this document and others.
What did get across, though, was the plea for equal rights,
equal honour, equal freedom- that is: the plea for an end
to discrimination against Germany. (It was over the matter of persistent discrimination in the disarmament
negotiations that Hitler had taken Germany out of the
League of Nations.) This plea for "equality" had a tremendous effect abroad. It really did seem no more than fair,
and perhaps even aiming at a more properly balanced
international stability (the "genuine, universal peace" of
the translation).
But also equal rights, honour, and freedom meant
allowing Germany to conduct her domestic affairs her own
way. That, too, could be presented and seen as no more
than the right that either was or should be tbe right of
any country. The nation state wasJ after all- and still isthe effective political unit. And it was only a country constituted or re-constituted after the first world war, like
Poland, that had SJ;lecial clauses on the protection of
minorities, notably jews, written into its peace treaty. 14
But then Poland was a country witb a large Jewish population and a bad history of anti- Sernitism. Germany's
Jewish population was small and German anti-Semitism
probably no worse than many other people's- indeed until the 1920s Germany attracted Jews from Poland and
Russia, because it was such a civilised country.
Let me here interpolate something that is in a curious,
a mysterious way both central and peripheral to tbe story
of Nazi Germany: the part the Jews played in that story.
That it should have been peripheral may strike you as
odd. But on the practical plane it really was:
the otber nations did not go to war with Hitler or fight
the Germans to save the Jews. And it is a mistake, a
serious mistake, to concentrate on the fate of the Jews
in that drama to the exclusion of all else. It is an
understandable mistake, because regarded as a people the
Jews did have the heaviest losses proportionate to their
number. Even the Russians and Poles, whose losses were
stupendous, were "only':_ if that word can be permitted
-decimated. But of the roughly eleven million European Jews between four-and-a-half and six millionabout half-were done to death by the Nazis. 15 The exact figure is hard to establish. And it is not the thing that
matters most. What does matter is the Jewish experience
of forsakenness- and that can never be brought horne
to nonjews by numbers.
But neither must it be allowed to perpetuate Hitler's
WINTER 1984
�heresy. What was that heresy? That genealogy is the only
true theology: that it is by the blood of a "race" that we
are saved or damned.
That whole sad chapter of history has been vulgarized
·in a number of ways. The saddest of them is the
vulgarization that falls into Hitler's own trap, his own
way of publicly presenting or misrepresenting what he
was really after: the vulgarization that sees that conflict
as one of jews and gentiles, or '1\ryans" as the Nazis called
them; or as one ofJews and Christians. That last mistake
even the Nazis did not make: on the contrary, they were
so concerned to dechristianize the gentiles -with Hitler,
of course, as the new saviour of the gentiles- that one
of the forms their attack on Christianity took was to treat
it as a Jewish thing and therefore to be rejected by the
Germans.
One can even take this further. Hitler, the great
liberator, once said to one of his followers who later left
him, perhaps because of this dictum and all it stood for:
"Conscience is a Jewish invention?' 16 Hitler was out to
remove the invention and its inventors.
This makes it clear, or at least strongly suggests, that
behind the "racial" struggle stood a more fundamental
one: a war of religion: not of Christianity versus Judaism,
but of a new heathenism against the Jewish and Christian faith and tradition.
That was the central significance of the Jews in that
drama, as central as that of the relationship of Jews and
Christians; and of Christians- the nominal and the other
kind- to Christianity and to humanity.
I
t is dangerous and inadvisable to call any twentieth
century war a "crusade?' Yet there was the unmistake-
able element of godlessness in Hitler's Germany. And
perhaps crusaders were never totally innocent champions
of the faith. However just the cause, all war, especially
modern war, is fraught with guilt and at least incidental
injustice. The dilemma is inescapable. Nor do I think
pacifism a way out. Some wars have to be fought. But
those engaged in them should not lose all sense of the
limits of the necessary and the permissible.
In January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting
in North Africa, announced the demand for unconditional surrender. It meant that they wanted to announce
to the world, and especially to their Soviet allies, that
they would not negotiate peace conditions, such as, for
instance, a cessation of hostilities in the West while Germany went on fighting on her Eastern front. I will not
here go into the wisdom of that proclamation or deal with
the clarification contained in Churchill's explanation two
years later of what it meant and what it did not mean. 17
The doctrine was delivered at a juncture in the war when
the German Africa Corps was at last being driven back,
West, from Egypt and the Suez Canal not to return again
but soon to surrender in Tunisia. Europe was groaning
under the German yoke and the Nazi policy of coercion
and extermination was in full swing. The British and
American air forces were bombing Germany very heavily.
The German advance in the East had been halted at Stalingrad and the remnants of the German Sixth Army were
to surrender there a few weeks later. The Russians were
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
still bearing the brunt of it, but the war was at last turning on its hinge of fate, to use Churchill's term.
It was after the Stalingrad surrender and, I think,
before that in Africa- though it may have been after that
too- that we who were engaged in what was grandly
called "political intelligence" in London heard of an event
in Germany that was as surprising as it was heartening.
(It was probably the beginning of my henceforth abiding,
some might say obsessive, interest in what enables people to resist pressures in our difficult century.)
A group of students in Munich had been executed
for anti-Nazi propaganda. Their death was very sad, of
course, but it also lifted our spirits. Here was a group
of young people who from childhood or adolescence up
had been subjected to Nazi conditioning, to Nazi education and organization; and yet they had turned against
the regime, knowing full well the risks involved. What
we learnt subsequently was that they had not just done
it when Germany seemed to be losing the war but had
started many months before. This group called itself "The
White Rose" and seemed at first to have sprung up out
of nowhere. But we soon learnt more. We even saw some
of their prose. One of their leaflets had been smuggled
out to neutral Sweden and from there conveyed to
England.
More details of the undertaking and end of these five
students and one professor reached us via Switzerland;
these reports were not always accurate. That is how
legends grow. The heart of the matter, however, was not
a legend but the encouraging truth that even in the most
oppressive circumstances the spirit of freedom and justice
may manifest itself- indeed that it bloweth where it
listeth.
Little by little, over the years, over the decades, the
facts were established. After the war the University of
Munich put up a memorial to its most intrepid professor
and students and gave their names- or the names of two
of them- to its Department of Political Science, and the
city named streets, squares, and schools after them. Both
Germanies put them on postage stamps.
Collectively they had adopted the mysterious name
of White Rose and headed the leaflets they printed and
distributed secretly "Leaflets of the White Rose;' Blatter
der Weissen Rose. The blooming of that Rose was brief:
its preparation long. As for its after-effects-who is to
say what they were or may be?
The one woman among those sentenced to deatha girl of 21, her name was Sophie Scholl- had a dream
the night before her execution and told it to her cell-mate:
On a sunny day I was carrying a little child in a long white
dress to be baptised. The way to the church led up a steep
mountain. But I held the child firmly and securely in my arms.
Suddenly there was a crevasse in front of me. I had just enough
time to lay the child down on the other side before I fell into
the abyss.
Sophie tried to explain this dream to her cell-mate: "The
child is our idea, which will prevail despite all obstacles.
We were allowed to prepare the way; but we must first
die for it:' 18
Willi Graf was the last of the six to die. 19 His sister
11
�in a diary her brother had kept in 1933- the first year
of Hitler's power, when Willi was fifteen-where it stood
suddenly, all by itself, in the midst of boyish descriptions
of youth group meetings and excursions: It was this
sentence: "But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers
only."
She then goes on:
Ever since 1934 the conflict with National Socialism had been
a burning problem for Willi and his friends. The question
What should we do against it?' became the cardinal point of
their thinking. Even the question of tyrannicide was discussed
one night at their Easter meeting in 1934 ... .The friends were
agreed that it was not enough to be indignant in small closed
circles. ("They discuss;' she quotes Willi's comment on a visit
by relatives, "the usual stuff, see the dangers, but think they
have to stick it out;" and she then continues:) He wrestled with
these problems, just because he inclined far more to a contemplative life and habitually subordinated politics to metaphysical values. He was not a dynamic person; on the contrary, he liked to keep his reserve and loved order. But the constant occupation of his thoughts with "our situation" (as he
called the definition of his own and his friends' attitude to their
time) fmally put him on the path that seemed to him inevitable.
The determination to let his inner attitude result in action grew
slowly but steadily. When the war started, Willi said from the
outset that it must and that it would be lost. This conviction
separated him from many people, even from some of the friends
of his youth who believed they had to defend their fatherland
at all costs. His inner loneliness increased more and more, and
especially when he was drafted in January 1940 and started
training in a medical unit in Munich. 20
Sophie Scholl.
says that he ''was not a dynamic person." That is probably what makes him the most impressive of the six to
me. Let me give you her phrase in its context, and in
her words:
Willi was not a political type of person in the superficial sense.
He had no natural inclination to revolutionary action. But
when intellectual freedom of choice is not guaranteed, or
development in accordance with one's own inner law, or the
ability to be simply human; when a_ regime on the contrary
negates all this and enforces forms of thinking and of life which
keep violating human dignity most deeply: then a young person with sound instincts and a sense of watchfulness and faith
will rebel. If he is moreover plucky and prepared for a sacrifice
and is confirmed and encouraged by likeminded friends, then
he must actively resist such enslavement and finally become
an antagonist of the spirit of the times. Thus Willi was driven
to the role of having to rebel quite against his own disposition.
And then she quotes the sentence which stands as motto
over the whole short memoir of her brother. It is taken
from the First Epistle of James, verse 22. She found it
12
After his final arrest, Willi Graf himself was asked
by the Gestapo, the secret police, to give them an account
of his life. And this is what he told them:
He was born in 1918, in the Rhineland. In 1922 his
family moved to the Saar. His father became a manager
in a firm of wine wholesalers. Willi had two sisters. The
family led a comfortable, though frugal, life.
Religion was the center of the children's education
and they were taught to respect parents and superiors.
Willi's father was a man of probity in his professional and
private life and demanded the same of his children. He
was severe when Willi showed signs of dishonesty or disobedience. Willi's mother was affectionate and totally
dedicated to her children and the welfare of her family.
Willi was initiated into the observances and life of the
church at an early age, and the seasons were filled with
the spirit of religion. (By that, I suppose, he meant that
he experienced the seasons consciously as parts of the
church year.)
At the age of ten, Willi was sent to what the Germans call a humanistisches Gymnasium, that is, a high school
teaching Greek and Latin. His special interests were German literature, religion, and later Greek and music; also
geography and history. He liked to construct things in
his free time, worked on light and bell systems, and tried
to understand the mysteries of radio.
He liked to go walkiog, especially in the summer vacations, came to know and love his country, and became
a lover of nature. During his last years at school, he had
a chance to visit faraway places in Germany, Italy,
Yugoslavia, and he relished the experience of distant lands
WINTER 1984
�and of different people with other customs. The precious
memories of these walking tours would sustain him
throughout the rest of the year.
His mother opened the eyes of her children, when
they were still quite young, to the social and economic
sufferings of others. He was taught to do without certain things so that a poorer child could benefit. He occasionally accompanied his mother on charitable
missions. 2 1
The actual phrase Graf used in his draft autobiography for the Gestapo was: "Thus I learnt the significance of personal charity:' He was clearly trying to
stress the contrast to the political approach of the Nazis
to "the common good?' The document-his police autobiography- is characterized throughout by two things: the
judicious omission of certain incriminating features of
his biography of which I shall speak later; and the equally
judicious inclusion of statements .intended to educate his
enemies or at least to put on record the convictions that
animated him. By "omissions" I mean, for instance, the
discretion observed on the precise nature and circumstances of those walking-tours: they were undertaken-at some risk- by a very close-knit illegal youth
group. By the attempt to educate his enemies I mean
references to "personal charity;' or religion- even the appreciation of strange peoples and their ways.
This brief life then continues: Willi says of himself
Willi Graj in uniform.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that he always had a great need for fellowship and had
close friendships with playmates and schoolmates. This
was what led him to join the Catholic youth organizations to which he belonged for many years and where
his interest in religious and literary questions was further developed by likeminded companions. His religious
and ('ideological" development was fairly unproblematic.
He grew from the childlike notions formed at home and
in his first religious instruction into the greater world
offaith, in whose doctrines he felt secure and protected.
Even violent and long discussions with boys who thought
differently could only endanger this security temporarily, but not in the long run. 22
Willi's (police) autobiography continues: In November 1937 he went to the University of Bonn to study
medicine. Since the summer of 1935 he had been determined to become a doctor, because, he said, he thought
that would give him the best opportunity to help others.
"This seemed .to me;' I am translating verbatim now, "the
most beautiful task, giving, as it does, a chance to put
into practice the commandment which to me is the most
compelling of all, to love my neighbor. But I also worked
on philosophical and literary questions in order to continue my intellectual education and to make firmer the
structure of my religious views."2 3
(Actually his sister says that if it had not been for the
Nazis, Willi would have gone into philosophy or theology,
not into medicine; and that he only chose that subject
of study because it was relatively free from ideological
interference; yet that does not make Willi's statement to
the Gestapo a lie; it was merely less than the whole truth;
and it gave him a chance to remind his captors of a commandment they also learnt as children, only perhaps less
well. Even the mention of the year 1935 as the year in
which he decided to study medicine in order to help his
fellow-men may have been deliberate: that was the year
in which the Saar territory, detached from Germany by
the Treaty of Versailles, had the plebiscite envisaged by
that treaty and voted to rejoin Germany. Willi and his
friends had observed developments in Germany with
growing alarm; but until 1935 they had been free from
the pressures to which the inhabitants, not to say the inmates, of the Reich were subjected.)
He read a lot, Willi continues in his official autobiography, especially modern German writers and theological and philosophical works. He had time for active
sports and the enjoyment of music.
I shall quote the end verbatim too: "During these years
I experienced the smaller and larger conflicts between
the church and offices of the state and party and could
not understand them, because no state can have permanence without religion .... All order is from God,
be it the family, the state, or the people:'24
This young man of twenty-five knew more clearly and
firmly what even the boy of fifteen had known when
Hitler began to destroy the old order to build his own
New Order, an order without God-but with the new
idols of race and people, and with the divine Fuhrer
himself something between prophet and deity. Lutherans
had greater trouble discerning and opposing the ungodly
nature of this new civil authority.
13
�But let us have a few more facts of Willi Grafs life.
They come from his surviving sister, from friends, from
letters and diaries. He belonged to a Catholic youth organization until it was suppressed, and then he belonged
to an illegal successor organization. He would not make
concessions to associates he considered faithless. When
he was fifteen, in 1933, he struck off from his address
book names of boys who had belonged to his group and
who were now in the Hitler Youth. He refused to join
the Hitler Youth, although he was threatened with nonadmission to the final school exam, the precondition of
university entrance, unless he became a member. An
early arrest in January 1938- there were numbers of arrests for activities in illegal youth groups-was terminated
by an amnesty to celebrate the annexation of Austria. 25
The autobiography he wrote for the Gestapo after
his later arrest was, of course, not only aimed at not in-
criminating himself, but also at not incriminating family
and friends. Those years of semi-illegality were a good
training in careful formulation. And his circumspection
was combined with fortitude. He was kept alive for
months after the execution of the others, because the investigating authorities hoped to get more facts and names
and leads from him by threats; he never obliged them.
So finally, on 12 October 1943, they beheaded him too.
He had been a careful reader and given to writing
things down that impressed him. With friends he trusted
he loved to discuss the most serious questions passionately
and thoroughly.
The legal and later illegal youth groups also had given
members much training in the endurance of physical
hardship and developed their resourcefulness and
stamina. In fact, Willi became exactly what Hitler wanted
his boys, the Hitler Youth, to be; the Fuhrer had put it
in winged words that Nazi youth leaders were forever
quoting: "Tough as leather, swift as greyhounds, hard as
steel:' (Well- Hitler actually said "Krupp steel.") But there
was one vital difference: Willi Graf combined these
qualities with a mind of his own and an unshakable faith.
A greyhound is a dog, though a very noble kind of
dog. You can condition the reflexes of a dog. You can
condition the reflexes of human beings too. But you
should not try to make men into nothing but conditioned
reflexes. And these are the chieflessons of the Nazi period
to me: how terribly manipulable people are, especially
in our twentieth century; but also that there are limits
to this manipulability. And there is a rider: we must help
to set the limits and defend them.
Back to Willi Graf, though. He began his medical
studies in 1937. In January 1940 he was called up and
trained in a medical unit in Munich. This transfer
separated him from his old friends. He. served in Germany, on the Channel Coast, in Belgium and France,
Croatia and Serbia; fmally in Poland and Russia.
In April 1942 he got study leave and returned to
Munich. Apart from his medical studies, he worked in
philosophy and theology and took an increasing interest
in liturgical questions and in psychology. When there was
time, he did some fencing. He joined the Bach Choir
and went to concerts whenever he could.
It was then, looking for new friends, that he got to
14
kuow a brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and
their friends Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorell.
With them- the men were all medical students on leave
from the army and Sophie a student of biology and
philosophy and musical psychology- he met Professor
Kurt Huber who taught philosophy and musical psychology. They were all agreed in their opposition to the
Nazis and shared many interests, chiefly in writing that
mattered; and- despite their different denominations- they were united by shared Christian convictions.
Jointly they came to the conclusion that they ought to
engage in active propaganda against the Nazis and that
this should first take the form of leaflets. 26
his may be the moment to describe the very different route by which Hans Scholl reached that
point. If the group had a ringleader, it was Hans
Scholl. He was what is described as a "dynamic" person.
Born in 1918, the same year as Willi Graf, he was
the son of a small town mayor. But later the family moved
to a bigger town, Ulm. They had three daughters and
T
two sons, of whom Hans was the elder. They were Pro-
testants, the Mother probably more pious than the father.
I am not sure what their politics were, only that the
father was opposed to the Nazis from the outset. Later
he also spent some time in jail for this opposition. I do
not know what form this opposition took. I only know
that he called Hitler "the scourge of God:' That may have
been what did it.
But it was long before, at the very beginning, that
Hans Scholl, finding his father's disapproval of this great
new Movement reactionary, decided to join the Hitler
Youth, and his broth:er and sisters followed him. 27
Ten years after Hitler had come to power, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, a Protestant theologian opposed to the
Nazis- he later died on the gallows- wrote of the great
masquerade of evil. He said: "For evil to appear disguised
as light, beneficence, historical necessity, and social
justice, is simply bewildering to anyone brought up in the
world of our traditional ethical concepts; but for the
Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it precisely confirms the radical malice of evil."28
It may seem strange now, but the masquerade was
very effective. And the younger Scholls were swept away
by the idea of a real people's community, the social justice
and equality promised by Hitler, and they joined the
march of history. In doing that, Hans Scholl was not
unlike many other young Germans opposing their hidebound parents.
It was not the Bible that showed Hans Scholl the error of his ways. To that he only came much later. What
first put him off was the fact that the fellowship of the
Hitler Youth had an element of regimentationsomething of the Gleichschaltung I mentioned before.
His surviving elder sister mentions an incident that
gave her-momentarily-to think; but the moment
passed. She writes:
We were taken seriously-taken seriously in a quite remarkable
way-and that aroused our enthusiasm. We felt we belonged
to a large, well-organized body that honoured and embraced
everyone, from the ten-year-old to the grown man. We sensed
WINTER 1984
�Ham Scholl.
that there was a role for us in the historic process, in a movement that was transforming the masses into a Volk. We believed that whatever bored us or gave us a feeling of distaste,
would disappear of itself. Once a fifteen-year-old girl, after we
had gone to lie down under the wide, starry sky at the end
of a long cycling tour, said, "Everything would be fine, but this
thing about the Jews I just can't stomach?' The troop leader
assured us that Hitler knew what he was doing and for the
sake of the greater good we would have to accept certain difficult and incomprehensible things. But the girl was not quite
satisfied with her answer. Others took her side, and suddenly
the attitudes in our varying home backgrounds were reflected
in the conversation. I spent a restless night in that tent, but
in the end we were just too tired, and the next day was indescribably splendid and filled with new experiences. The conversation of the night before was for the moment forgotten.
In our group there developed a sense of belonging that carried us safely through the difficulties and loneliness of
adolescence, or at least gave us that illusion. 29
One awkward feature about Inge Scholl's book, if I
may say so, is that she hardly ever gives a date for
anything. But this must have been an early incident,
earlier than the Niirnberg Laws-let alone the pogrom
of 1938 or the deportations that started in the war. It
probably took place about the time when nothing much
was being done yet about the Jews, apart from verbal and
pictorial vilification and the removal from the civil
service.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But it is another matter she mentions as an early
cause of her brother's discontent. He liked to sing and
he sang to his troop, accompanying himself on the guitar.
What did he sing? The songs of the Hitler Youth. (I have
studied their official song book-edition of 1941-and
was amazed to find many good songs in it, and not the
bad one I was looking for, about 'jewish blood spurting
from the knife:') But Hans also sang foreign songsNorwegian or Russian, or something like that. His
leaders forbade it. He disregarded the prohibition. They
threatened punishment. He got. depressed.
But there was a great experience in store for him.
He was to be the flag bearer for his troop at the big annual Party Rally in Niirnberg. He went with high
hopes; and came back disillusioned. The full implications
of the regimentation-not only of the Hitler Youth, but
of the whole show, all of German life as the Party clearly
intended to form it in its own image -all this had now
come home to him.
And there was the occasional book his leaders would
not let him read, because the author was a Jew, or a
pacifist.
But the final break came after a promotion: Hans
now had the rank of Fiihnleinfohrer (which meant being
in charge of 150 or so boys.) His troop had designed and
made a banner for itself and showed up with it at a parade
before some higher-ups of the Hitler Youth. A boy of
twelve carried it. A superior Hitler Youth leader
demanded its surrender. There were to be no private flags
or emblems. The boy stood firm. He stood a bit less firm
when the surrender order was given for the third time.
Hans intervened. He stepped forward and slapped the
Hitler Youth superior. That was the end of his career in
the Hitler Youth. His subsequent membership in an illegal youth group ended in arrest and some weeks in jail.
But he too, like Willi Graf, benefited from the postArnchluss amnesty.
Gradually all the young Scholls heard of disturbing
events, of things happening to people they knew. They
now asked their father about the meaning of some of this
and it seems that old Scholl did call things by their proper names and even disabused his offspring of the
notion -very widespread in all those dreadful twelve
years-that whatever horrible things might be happening, they were the doing of wild or mean or sadistic subordinates or local potentates or toughs-and that the Fuhrer
did not know about them.
The father explained to his children that this really
was unlikely. Hitler knew. Their father also tried to explain how such a man could come to power. (I don't suppose he found it any easier than I do.) Finally it seems
that he told his children that he wanted them to be free
and upright, whatever the difficulties.
That, at last, bridged the generation gap whichlike many another gap- Hitler had exploited so skillfully.
It also sent Hans back to the sources, the foundations. Rilke was not much help, neither was Stefan
George, or another poet HOlderlin; nor was Nietzsche.
Hans finally found Plato and Socrates, the early Christian authors, Augustine and Pascal; and the Bible, whose
words, as his sister says, now acquired for him a new
15
�Professor Kurt Huber.
Christoph Probst.
and surprising significance, an overwhelming relevance
and immediacy, and an undreamt of splendour.
He was a student of medicine now. And the war came.
After a while he was drafted for a medical unit and served
in the French campaign. Then he was sent to Munich
as a soldier-student, a member of a military student unit.
It was a strange life, commuting between barracks and
the university and the clinic. And all this in a steadily
worsening political climate, with oppression growing
harsher every day, and more and more becoming
known-piecemeal and not always reliably-about the
crimes of the regime.
It was mimeographed copies of a sermon of the
Catholic Bishop of MUnster against "euthanasia;' the
secret killing of incurables-which, however, could not
be kept altogether secret, since it was carried on inside
Germany- it was Bishop Galen's public sermon about
this crime, his denunciation of it as not only immoral
but also illegal, a sermon preached in a remote part of
Germany, but disseminated throughout Germany in
typed and mimeographed copies- secretly, of coursethat made Hans Scholl think of leaflets as a possibility.
He was relieved that someone, at last, had spoken, openly.
And, it seemed, such open speech could be spread.
He was not alone. In particular, he had a fatherly
friend and mentor, Carl Muth, the former editor of a
Catholic monthly, Hochland, now suppressed -whom he
had met in an almost accidental way and whom he
thenceforth saw almost daily, learning all the while, and
growing clearer and stronger. There were others too. The
underground intellectuals of Munich- middle-aged or
older men most of them, whom the Nazis had eliminated from public life-were an impressive bunch. They
included such people as Theodor Haecker, author of a
book on Virgil and translator and exponent of Newman
and Kierkegaard. ''
16
Alexander Schmorell.
And there were friends among the students, especially
among the military-medical students. The closest among
them was Alexander Schmorell, son of a Russian mother
whom he lost as an infant and who was then brought
up by a Russian nurse after the family's flight to Germany, where his father married again and became a wellknown physician. Alex had a great and romantic love
for Russia, which he shared with his friends. Then there
was Christoph Probst, the only one of them to be married, a very young father of two children, with a third
on the way. Finally there was Willi Graf.
Sophie Scholl came to Munich to study biology and
philosophy in the spring of 1942, when she had just
turned 21. She was three years younger than her brother
Hans. She had had to do her labour and war service
before being allowed to become a student. Her philosophy
professor was the man mentioned earlier, Kurt Huber.
He was a somewhat strange man, but, as far as the Scholls
and their friends were concerned, the best man in the
university. They all went to his lectures on Leibniz and
his Theodicy. They got to know him better outside the
university, too; and he introduced them to other people.
They met for readings and discussions.
In the early summer of 1942 the first leaflets turned
up. Hans Scholl had started them, and he had been so
discreet that even his sister at first did not know he was
connected with them until she saw a marked passage in
a book he had. It was a passage in Schiller's essay on the
legislation of Lycurgus and Solon and was clearly the
source of part of the first leaflet. This had had long quotations from the essay and included a passage whose contemporary relevance was pretty plain. It described the
legislation of Lycurgus as a political and psychological
masterpiece, indeed admirable- unless looked at in
human terms. Its very perfection and durability then
became a matter for regret. The longer such a state exWINTER 1984
�isted, the more harm it did. It sacrificed all moral sensibilities and severed all human ties and did not just
countenance slavery but required its cruel enforcement.
The Spartan code abolished natural rights and morality
and treated men as means not ends. Such a republic
"could endure only if the mental development of the people was arrested, and thus it could maintain its existence
only if it failed to fulfill the highest and only true purpose of political government." 31
This first leaflet had begun with the words:
open and befouled the whole body. The majority of former
opponents went into hiding, the German intelligentsia fled to
a dark cellar, there, like night-shades away from light and sun,
gradually to choke to death. Now we stand at the end. Now
it is our task to find one another again, to enlighten each other,
never to forget and never to rest until even the last man is persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system.
When thus a wave of rebellion goes through the land, when
'it is in the air; when many join the cause, then in a last mighty
effort this system can be shaken off. After all a terrible end
is preferable to an endless terror.
Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself
to be "governed" without opposition by an irresponsible clique
subject to base instincts. It is surely a fact that to-day every
honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among
us has any conception of the immensity of the shame that will
befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen
from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes- crimes that
infinitely exceed all measure-reach the light of day? If the
German people are already so corrupted and decayed in their
inmost being that they do not raise a hand and, frivolously
trusting in a questionable law of history, yield up man's highest
possession, that which raises man above all other creatures,
if they surrender free will, the freedom of man to seize and
turn the wheel of history in accordance with rational decisions;
if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so
far along the road toward becoming a spiritless and cowardly
mass-then, then indeed they deserve their downfall. 32
The leaflet went on to speak of the murder of
Jews-300,000 in Poland it said-and of Poles, and of
the need for more than compassion. Doing nothing constituted complicity. If they tolerated these things, Germans were guilty. Now that they had recognized the Nazis
in their true colours, Germans had the duty to destroy
them. 33
The third leaflet discussed forms of government and
utopias- the highest of them, it said, being the City of
God. The present state was a dictatorship of evil.
Something had to be done about it and cowardice must
not hide behind a cloud of prudence. Only passive
resistance could be offered, but that must be offered
wherever possible. It was not military victory over
Bolshevism that must be the prime concern of Germans,
but on the contrary the defeat of the Nazis. There were
suggestions for various forms of sabotage, though no
blueprint for general action could be given and everyone
should use what opportunities offered in whatever way
seemed best. This leaflet concluded with a quotation from
Aristotle's Politics, a passage on tyranny. 34
The fourth leaflet had an appeal to Christians to attack evil where it was strongest. It was strongest in the
power of Hitler. The leaflet had a quotation from Ecclesiastes and one from the German poet N oval is on
Christianity as the foundation of peace. It also had a
postscript, assuring the reader that the White Rose was
not in the pay of any foreign power, adding: "Though
we know that National Socialist power must be broken
by military means, we are trying to achieve a renewal
from within!'35
Then there was a long hiatus: for the men were sent
to Russia during the long vacations between semesters.
What they saw in the East confirmed them in their
resolve. Hans saw Jews in labour gangs. All saw the
miserable conditions prevailing in Poland. All fell in love
with the Russians.
When they returned to Munich in November, they
resumed their secret work with redoubled energy and
it became quite feverish. There were two more leaflets,
the last a special appeal to students. It began with the
shock produced by the staggering German defeat at Stalingrad. The students, the "intellectual workers;' should
not allow themselves to become the tools of the regime,
but put an end to it. A recent incident at Munich university had shown that the students could stand up to the
Party. The nation was looking to the students. It ended,
"Our people are rising up against the National Socialist
enslavement of Europe in a fervent new breakthrough
of freedom and honour:'36
The incident referred to had in fact been spectacular
There were six leaflets in all, in thousands of copies. They
were distributed anonymously and secretly. Those, many
of them, that were sent through the mails, were mostly
posted in the cities to which they were sent, in order to
avoid any hint to the police that Munich was the headquarters of this activity. Risky train journeys were undertaken by several members of the group to take leaflets
to cities like Stuttgart, Augsburg, Vienna, Salzburg. Willi
Graf even took a duplicating machine to a friend in the
West and recruited friends and sympathizers and collaborators where he could. Recipients were assured that
their names had simply been taken from telephone
directories- to free them of the fear that they might be
on some list and thus exposed to punishment.
The leaflets usually had quotations towards the end
of their text, as this first one had Schiller on the lawgivers.
The second leaflet began:
It is impossible to engage in intellectual discussion with National Socialism because there is nothing intellectual about it.
It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy
[Weltanschauung], for if there were such a thing, one would have
to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its
validity or to fight it. In reality, however, we have a totally different picture: even in its first beginnings this movement
depended on the deception of one's fellow man; even then it
was rotten to the core and could save itself only by constant
lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of ''his" book
(a book written in the worst German I have ever read, and
yet it has been elevated to the rank of a Bible in this nation
of poets and thinkers): 'It is unbelievable to what extent one
must deceive a people in order to rule it! If at the start this
cancerous growth in the nation was not too noticeable, it was
only because there were still enough forces at work that
operated for the good, so that it was kept at bay. As it grew
larger, however, and finally attained power ... the tumor broke
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
17
�and encouraging; but it had also been unique. The Nazis
saw to it that it remained unique.
At the 4 70th anniversary celebrations of the university, the Bavarian Gauleiter had addressed a crowd of
about 3,000 students, many of them in uniform, on the
meaning of the event and of the place of students in the
German struggle. As for women students, he had no objection to their occupying places at the university, but
he did not see why they should not present the Fuhrer
with children, for instance a son for every year at the
university; if they were not attractive enough to get a man
by their own efforts, he'd be glad to send one of his adjutants to each one of them and they could be assured
of an enjoyable experience.
At this there was unrest in the auditorium. Women
students in the gallery stood up, prepared to leave. They
were stopped. The other students, especially those in
uniform on the ground floor booed so much that the
Gauleiter had to interrupt his speech. Later he did speak
on, but the spell was broken and he kept being interrupted. He was furious and gave the order for the women
students to be held in custody. The leader of the Nazi
student organization demanded a voluntary identification of the women protesters upstairs. Twenty-four identified themselves and were arrested at once. The SS
pushed the other students out of the auditorium. When
they emerged from the building they found all the rest
of the men students standing outside, like a wall, giving
them an ovation. They had stood there for over an hour.
In groups they broke through the cordon, got inside,
seized the Nazi student leader, beat him up and held him
as hostage until the women were set free. At that moment the police arrived. The students also turned on the
police and fought their way through into the city. But
some of them were arrested. The atmosphere, however,
was electric. Students of the most diverse disciplines suddenly found themselves acting together. And suddenly
all were friends; and the population of Munich was on
their side.
The Gauleiter called another meeting a couple of
weeks later and threatened to close the university if peace
and order were not restored. The men would be sent to
the front, the women into the factories. But he also
apologized for his earlier speech. Those who had been
arrested had been set free. Clearly the students had won
this round. But it was to be the only round.
It may even have led to the end of the White Rose.
The Scholls and their friends were, of course, immensely
heartened by this experience of spontaneous solidarity
against a foulmouthed party functionary. But they may
have overestimated the permanent potential that could
be mobilized against the Party. In any case they now
became bolder. They wrote things on the walls of Munich
in the night: "Down with Hitler;' and "Freedom." They
managed not to get caught doing this. They were armed
to shoot their way out if necessary. 37
But on 18 February 1943 Hans and Sophie took a
suitcase full of copies of the last leaflet to the university,
spread them about in corridors and on the stairs while
lectures were in progress and doors closed, and finally
18
threw the rest down the centrallightshaft from an upper floor. The janitor saw them and took instant action
to apprehend them. They were arrested and taken away.
That was on a Thursday. Their trial, together with
that of Christoph Probst, was on the following Monday.
It was conducted by the People's Court and they were
sentenced to death and beheaded the same day. 38 There
were four days between their being caught and being
executed.
Graf, Schmorell, and Huber were also arrested and
tried, together with eleven others, in mid-April. The
sentences ranged from acquittal to death. Three women
students, for instance, got prison sentences for failing to
report treasonable activities. 39
Graf, Huber, and Schmorell were sentenced to death,
Huber having already been expelled from the Faculty
of the university by his colleagues. He had also been
deprived of his doctorate 40 In the case of the first three,
incidentally, the Scholls and Probst, there had been an
assembly of the student body, called by the Nazi student
organization, on the evening of the day on which the three
were executed, to denounce them and to declare the loyalty of the student body to the Fuhrer and the National
Socialist Movement. Attendance, again, at least according to the report of the District Student Leader, was
about 3,000.41
The parents of Graf and Schmorell asked for clemency. Hitler personally turned down the request. 42
Huber's publisher asked for a stay of execution, to enable
his author to finish his book on Leibniz, arguing .that
it would redound to the greater glory of German culture.
He was allowed to work on it in his prison cell until July,
but he did not finish his book before they took him to
the guillotine. 4 ' (There were about twenty of them in
use in Germany at that time.)
In attempts to get him to implicate a friend, Willi
Grafwas subjected to considerable pressure and threats
of a more painful death. He resisted to the end and was
the last to die, in October of that year. 44
Inspired by the example of the White Rose, othersin Munich, Hamburg, and elsewhere- tried to carry on
similiar activities. Eight more paid with their lives, in
1944 and 1945, out of more than sixty who were arrested
and imprisoned. About thirty were involved in Munich
and about fifty in Harnburg 45 The other groups were
more heterogeneous and seem to have lacked the Christian core and cohesion and fortitude of the White Rose. 46
should like to sum up in two sentences what the
story of these students seems to me to show: In
order to recognize manipulation and to think not
only analytically but also constructively about politics,
they needed Plato and Aristotle and suchlike authors.
To find the courage and strength needed to stand up to
the power of the manipulators, they needed faith. But here
is a postlude, on a matter closely connected with the subject of language, rhetoric, persuasion, and faith.
The five students of the White Rose all sang in the
Munich Bach Choir, until the end. One day I hope to
be able to find out what they sang. But I can imagine
I
WINTER 1984
�what kind of thing it was. It was not all Bach but it was
all serious music, I am sure, music whose words mattered.
What you let out of your mouth always matters, of
course. At a time when language has become debased,
corrupted, meaningless or prohibited, what you sing matters even more. It would be interesting to know what the
Nazis allowed to be sung. I know that Handel was
censored- some of Handel. Willi Graf went to two performances of Messiah in December 1942, his last advent
season. After the first occasion he wrote in his diary that
it was an indescribable experience. What impressed him
were the faith and piety behind the work. He went again,
though the second time there was standing room only.
Again he was deeply impressed, especially by the aria,
"I know that my Redeemer liveth:' He mentioned it again
in a letter to his sister- they had heard it together- his
last letter, dictated to the prison chaplain before his
execution. 47
But Bach is much more powerful with his words than
Handel, and I just wonder what the Nazis did with cantatas and motets,
or,
for that matter,
with the
Magnificat- music that, for instance, mentions God's servant Israel. Could they allow it to be sung when they
had decided to force every male Jew to have the middle
name "Israel" on his papers? This was for purposes of
identification and segregation, like the later edict forcing all Jews to wear the yellow Star of David on their
clothes. Could the Nazis allow choirs to sing "Sing unto
the Lord a new song, and his praise in the congregation
of saints. Let Israel rejoice in him that made him: let
the children of Zion be joyful in their King ... ?"That
is Psalm 149, verses 1 and 2, which Bach set in his motet
"Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied." Or could they permit,
even in Latin, the singing of Luke 1, v. 54-55: "He has
helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed
forever;' seeing how Bach hammers home the "Abraham"
in his Magnificat and spreads the seed throughout the
· ages? Could the Nazis allow such words to be sung,
especially when they were set in such persuasive and
memorable ways? Or did they insist that only songs to
the new lord or idol should be sung and those that did
not too explicitly conflict with the new idolatry?
I do not know all the relevant deliberations of the
Ministry of Propaganda or the Ministry of Education
or the Reich Chamber of Music. They were"the controlling bodies for that kind of thing. But I know, for instance,
that at one of his staff conferences in April 1942, Dr.
Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Popular Enlightenment
and Propaganda, explained that he prohibited a broadcast of the Mozart Requiem the previous December
because ((its very sombre and world-negating text would
have had a bad effect on morale in the exceptionally
serious situation then prevailing"; adding that this was,
however, an exceptional case. One could not, he said,
"destroy or regard as non-existent the earlier cultural
achievements of a people just because the content of these
cultural achievements" ran ((counter to a new ideology''
and he explained ('that a distinction must be made between a historical approach and enjoyment of the cultural
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
achievements of earlier periods on the one side and the
development of one's own ideology on the other."4B
The bodies charged with ideological control must have
weighed the risk of dangerous Christian indoctrination
on the one side against the risk, on the other side, not
only of jettisoning the German cultural heritage, but also
of making the anti-Christian character of the regime too
clear.
With the churches under pressure and severely circumscribed in what they were permitted to do and say,
and persecuted, and prosecuted, when they exceeded
those limits, concert halls and choral societies were obvious places where the old creed could still be fostered
surreptitiously.
Lest you think that I overestimate this factor, let me
give you three examples, two on the Christian side, one
on the Nazi side. A brother of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, not
a particularly churchy man, was in a Berlin jail under
sentence of death. When the only surviving brother who
was still at liberty (Dietrich, too, was in prison)
visited his brother Klaus and said how nice it was that
Klaus could hear, in his mind's ear, the music of the Matthew Passion when he read the score he had in his prison
cell, Klaus said: "But the words also! The words!"4 9
Willi Graf recorded in his diary on 7 December 1942
(the day, incidentally, after that first Messiah) that he spent
the first part of the evening singing in the Bach Choir.
He thought it went quite well and added: "The words
of the Christmas songs and of the Schutz motet have their
special meaning. It is good to be able to do such things:'50
Another thing he did right up to the end was to prepare
and perform church liturgies with his friends. 51 Despite
the soldiering and the medical studies and the secret
political work, he found time and clearly felt a need for it.
The Nazis, on the other hand, made children, and
grownups, sing songs for their Movement and for .Germany, and dinned into all the doctrine that there was
and would be no Germany but Hitler's Germany. And
the boys who had innumerable times sung the words
"Germany, here we are; we consecrate our death to thee
as our smallest deed; when death comes to our ranks,
we shall be the great seed;' were, of course, singing
something plagiarized from Tertullian, a perversion of
Tertullian, who said that the blood of the martyrs is the
seed of Christians. These child martyrs were sacrificed,
and sacrificed themselves, for the fatherland up to the last
minutes of the war, manning the anti-aircraft guns and
fighting the Russians at the approaches and in the streets
of Berlin- fifteen and sixteen year-olds formed into local
battalions. As a surviving female Hitler Youth leader put
it: ''They wanted to make true the vows of their songs?' 52
However relaxed Goebbels may have sounded in that
Propaganda Ministry conference in 1942, the internal
intelligence network of the SS never relaxed its vigilance
where the churches were concerned and kept complaining about "church music as a means of denominational
propaganda?' "Denominational" meant roughly what in
America is sometimes called "Sectarian." The word was
used instead of "Christian;' which was what was really
meant. The fiction, which was very strenuously main-
19
�tained, was that the Nazi Party and Movement- which
in its official Party Program, promulgated in 1922 and
never carried out, had subscribed to something nebulous
called "Positive Christianity" 53 (a matter I shall be glad
to enlarge upon if asked)- the fiction was that the Nazis
wanted above all to unite all Germans and therefore had
to fight the divisive activities of the Protestant and
Catholic "denominations." But in this Security Service
report from which I have quoted, as in others, it is crystal
clear that what they were in fact fighting was the Christian faith itself, and any attempt to foster it. This report,
in October 1940, complained of the systematic expansion of perfomances of church music all over the Reich,
both in churches and in concert halls. These events, the
report said, were of high quality and very popular, made
most effective propaganda for the churches, and were apt
to call forth ovations from the audiences that amounted
to demonstrations. 54
In April 1943, a long report on church influence on
the young had a special section on the dastardly use the
churches were making of singing as a vehicle of Christian education. 55 In January 1944, another long report
on liturgical reform and the extra-mural promotion of
church music mentioned the fact that in Alsace, for instance, the Protestant church was systematically replacing sentimental hymns of the 19th century by musically
more valuable chorales of the time of the Reformation.
Even brass music was being revived in the reform
movement. 56
All this caused great and, I think, justified concern
to the watchdogs of the regime. What they did not say,
perhaps did not even realize (like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear), 57 was that brass in church music did not
just add to the fun, but has a rousing and invigorating
effect; they may not have known that the chorales of the
time of the Reformation were not just musically superior
to the soppy stuff of the Romantic era, but textually too.
The Germans had begun before any other people to
sing hymns in their own language. When Luther came,
he not only translated the Bible, creating something that
is worthy to stand beside the English ''Authorized Version" (the American "King James Bible") but also, being
very musical, made the chorale into a most important
and powerful vehicle of the new persuasion, making congregations sing. He put a lot of Catholic Latin hymns
into German and wrote more himself. Since then the Protestants in Germany have always had the better hymns
than the Catholics- until both declined in the century
of Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner. When the crucial
conflict with the neo-pagan movement approached and
during the crisis itself, most musical Christians, but
especially the Protestants, realized they needed more to
sustain them than the spineless songs of the nineteenth
century. They needed words and music that really meant
something. And whereas the Catholics were largely
preserved from apostasy by the clarity of their doctrine
and the prescribed observances of their faith, many Protestants may be said, I think, to have been pulled out
of their initial confusion not only by some of the more
clearheaded and courageous parsons and laymen and laywomen, but also by a return to the truths proclaimed in
20
Bible and Hymnal.
And perhaps even wordless music, provided it is pure,
has some such power. 5 8
Kurt Huber, this professor of philosophy, also
taught- and wrote on- music, both the physiology and
psychology of hearing and music, and, his special love,
folk music, the real rooted stuff- that was in fact being
rooted out, trampled underfoot, by "the march of history;'
by this mass movement that called itself"volkisch:' Though
physically somewhat handicapped- he had had infantile paralysis- he went to great lengths to hear and
preserve what still existed of such music. A companion
he once took on a musical mountain trip to a rather inaccessible part of the Bavarian Alps, to hear the yodeling of the dairymaids there, reports that when they had
left and had already gone a certain distance, these women
sent a kind of farewell yodel after them. Huber stopped
in his tracks, asked his companion for writing material,
and jotted down the yodel in figured bass notation. As
he did so, tears of emotion streamed down his face. 59 I
think I know what that emotion was. It was the emotion
that made Victor Zuckerkandl speak of "the miracle of
the octave" and on which, if I understand him aright,
St. Thomas Aquinas bases one of his proofs of God, the
one from "governance:' That may be an odd one to think
of when the world was-and still is-so visibly out of
joint. All the more moving, I would say, to hear or see
an example, a representation, or symbol of that governance, to hear the pre-established harmony.
1. See, for instance, Peter Loewenberg, ''The psychohistorical origins of the
Nazi youth cohort, The American Historical &view, volume 76, No. 5
(December 1971), pp 1457-1502.
2. The Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany (with
amendments) and Other Treaty Engagements, signed at Versailles, June 28,
1919 . .. Part VIII was on Reparation. Its Section I (General Provisions)
started with Article 231 which read: "The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and
her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and
Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany
and her allies."
3. The word Erhebung, here translated as "resurgence:' can also mean uprising; other senses are uplift, elevation, elation. It is in this latter sense that
T. S. Eliot used it in 1935~unfortunately, I think-in the second movement of "Burnt Norton:' the first of his Four Quartets:
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination .
4. Max Domarus, ed., Hiller. Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen .... (Munich, 1965), p. 208.
5. Compare this tastelessness and blasphemy with the editing of a sentence
in John Kennedy's inaugural address, which went through many drafts.
The first draft had a sentence that ran: 'We celebrate today not a victory
of the party, but the sacrament of democracy." In the final text this became:
"We observe today not a victory of pai'ty but a celebration of freedom."
The blasphemy was edited out. (Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy [New
Yock, 1966], p. 271.)
6. Katholisches KirchenblattfUr das Bistum Berlin, XXX, No. 28 (15 July 1934).
WINTER 1984
�7. A copy of the film, what remains of it, can be seen and heard at the National Archives in Washington. A partial transcript of the trial also survived. For one relevant fragment, see Volksgerichtshofs-Prozesse zum 20, Juli
1944. Transkripte von Tonbandjunden. Herausgegeben vom Lautarchiv des
Deutsehen Rundfunks (April, 1961), p. 122; for another see Gert Buchheit,
Richter in roter Robe: Preisler, Priisidenl des Volksgerichts!wfes (Munich, 1968),
p. 247.
8. Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitiiten und Hochschulen zu Adolf
Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat. Uberreicht vom Nationalsozialistischen Lehrerbund Deutschland/Sachsen (Dresden, n.d.),
pp. 13-14 and 36-37 (Heidegger) and 15-17 and 38-40 (Hirsch).
9. Ernst Nolte, ~zur 'I)rpologie des Verhaltens der Hochschullehrcr im Dritten
Reich;' Aus Politik und Geschichte, Beilage zur Wochenzeitung "Das Parlament,"
B 46/65 (17 November 1965), p. 11; now reprinted in Ern~;t Nolte, Marxismus, Farchismus, &Iter Kn'eg, (Stuttgart, 1977) where the passage "Heidegger
als Paradigma'' comes on pp. 147-8; there is also a translation, by Lawrence
Krader: Marxism, Fascism, Cold Jililr (Atlantic Highlands, NJ., 1982) where
the article appears on pp. 106-120 under the title "Behavioral Patterns of
University Professors in the Third Reich" and "Hcidegger as Paradigm"
on pp. 116-7. For a series oflectures on the subject of the German universities in the Third Reich, given at the University ofMmllch, see Die deutsche
Universitiit im Dritten Reich. Acht Beitriige (Munich, 1966). Fritz Leist, one
of the contributors, who discusses possibilities and limits of resistance at
universities, knew Willi Graf well and helped him and the White Rose
group.
10. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Gennan Dictatorship. The origins, structure, and
if.fects of National Socialism. Translated from the German by Jean
Steinberg.
.(New York, 1970), p. 268; it is a quotation from Heidegger's Rectoral Address, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitiit (Breslau,
1934), pp. 22 ff.
11. Walter Z. Laqueur, Young Germany. A history of the German youth movement
(New York, 1962), p. 191.
12. The word "intelligentsia'' was a very odd one to usc in the context. It was
meant to translate "die Gebildeten" which has such presumptuous overtones
of educational elitism and self-satisfaction that it is hard to find a real
English equivalent for it. Funny, all the same, that the-linguistically
somewhat primitive-translators should opt for a word of Russian origin
which was at best a loan word in English and should have been anathema
to all good Nazis, on whom it was incumbent to despise intellectuals, but
to at least appear to look up to Bildung. Perhaps they thought that only
Germans had Bildung, others merely had intellect, that evil thing.
13. Sec Note 8.
14. Treaty of Peace between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan, and Poland, signed at Versailles, June 28,
1919-especially Articles 2, 3, and 7-12. Also the letter, dated June 24,
1919, addressed to M. Paderewski by the President of the Conference
transmitting to him the Treaty to be signed by Poland under Article 93
of the Treaty of Peace with Germany.
15. For the most comprehem·ive treatment of the subject see Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews, (Chicago, 1961).
16. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks. A Sen·es of Conversations with Adolf Hitler
on his &al Aims (London, 1939), p. 220. The quotation went on: "It is
a blCmish, like circumcision:' There is no need to rely on Rauschning
alone. In his table talk, too, Hitler presents himself as the great liberator
from the J udeo-Christian slave morality and as heir of the Roman Emperor
Julian (the Apostate), the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, of Voltaire and
Nietzsche.
17. Cf. Beate Ruhm von Oppen, ed., Documents on Germany Under Occupation
1945-1954 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 1 and 31.
18. Inge Scholl, Die Weisse Rose (Frankfurt, 1955), pp. 101-102. For an American
version see Inge Scholl, Students Against 1jranny: The &sistance of the White
Rose, Munich, 1942-1943. Translated .
by Arthur R. Schultz (Middletown, Connecticut, 1970).
19. This account of his life is largely based on Gewalt und Gewissen. Willi Graf
und die "Weisse Rose." Eine Dokumentation von Klaus Viclhaber in Zusammcnarbeit mit Hubert Hanisch und Anneliese Knoop-Graf (Freiburg,
1964).
20. Ibid., pp. 24-25.
21. Ibid., pp. 37-38.
22. Ibid., p. 38.
23. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
24. Ibid., p. 39.
25. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
26. Ibid., pp. 25-27.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
27. What follows is largely based on the book by his surviving sister, Inge
Scholl, Die Weisse Rose (see note 18).
28. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widersland und Ergebung. Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft.
Herausgegeben von Eberhard B.e_thge (Munich, 1964), p. 10. cf. Letters
and Papers from Prison. Revised editioll:-Edited by Eberhard Bcthgc (New
York, 1967), p. 2.
29. Scholl, pp. 15f.
30. Christian Petry, Studentcn aufs SchafotL Die WezSse Rose und ihr Scheitern
(Munich, 1968), pp. 36-42. For Haecker's observations on the war years
see Theodor Haecker, JD.g- und Nachtbiicher 1939-1945 (Munich, 1947).
There is an English translation by Alexander Dru: Journal in the Night (New
York, 1950).
31. Petry, pp. 153-155. Translation of Schiller taken from Frederick Ungar,
ed., Friedrich Schiller. An anthology for our Time. In new English translations and
t!te on'ginal German . . (New York, 1959), p. 219.
32. Petry, p. 153.
33. Ibid., pp. 156-158.
34. Ibid., pp. 159-161.
35. Ibid., pp. 162-164.
36. Ibid., pp. 164-167.
37. Ibid., pp. 98-101.
38. Ibzd., pp. 175-183 for text of indictment and press notice about trial and
execution. Also Students against ?Jranny (see note 18), pp. 105-118 and 148,
for translation of indictment, sentence, and press notice.
39. Ibid., pp. 119-137 and Petry (note 30), pp. 195-211 for text of sentence.
40. Ibid., pp. 219-220.
41. Ibid., pp. 220-221.
42. Ibid., p. 211.
43. Clara Huber, ed., Kurt Huber zum Gediic!ttnis. Bildn1S eines Menschen, Denkers
und Forschers, dargestellt von seinen Freunden (Regensburg, 1947), pp.
30-32.
44. Petry, p. 136.
45. Thorsten Miillcr, "Der Duft der Weissen Rose; die erste historisch-kritische
Untersuchung der Affiire Scholl: cin redlichcr Versuch" in Die Zeit, 14
March 1969.
46. Petry, p. 138.
47. Gewalt und Gewissen (see note 19), pp. 87, 89, and 123.
48. Willi A. Boelcke, ed., The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels. The Nazi Propaganda War 1939-1-3. Translated ... by Ewald Osers (New York, 1970),
p. 234.
49. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonlwif/er, Man of Vision, Man of Courage.
Translated from the German by Eric Mosbacher, Peter and Betty Ross,
Frank Clarke, William Glen-Doepel. Under the editorship of Edwin
Roberston (New York, 1970), p. 832.
50. Gewalt und Gewissen (see note 19), p. 87.
51. Ibid., pp. 89-93 and 95.
52. Melita Maschmann, Fazit. Kein &chifertigungsversuch ... (Stuttgart, 1963),
p. 159.
53. Walther Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus. Dokumente 1933-1945. (Frankfmt,
1960), pp. 30-31.
54. Heinz Boberach, cd., Berichte des SD und der Gestapo iiber Kirchen und Kirchenvolk in Deutschland 1934-191-1- (Mainz, 1971), pp. 466-468.
55. Ibid., p. 801.
56. Ibid., pp. 877-880.
57. Psalm 58 (57), verse 4.
58. Willi Graf clearly felt something of the sort when he made the following
entry in his diary, on 21 January 1943, after hearing two cello suites by
Bach: "This music has a tremendous seriousness and with it a structure
of a kind rarely encountered elsewhere. It tells of an order of which at
one time a man was capable. We can only receive it for a future which
is going to be quite different." (Gewalt und GewzSsen-see note 19-p. 94.)
Compare what Stravinsky Wrote when he attacked the notion of music
as "expression": ''The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole
purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly,
the coordination between man and time. To be put into practice, its indispensable and single requirement is construction. Construction once
completed, this order has been attained, and there is nothing more to be
said. It would be futile to look for, or expect, anything else from it. It
is precisely this construction, this achieved order, which produces in us
a unique emotion having nothing in common with our ordinary sensations and our responses to the impressions of daily life." (Igor Stravinsky,
An Autobiography (New York, 1962), p. 54.
59. Kurt Huber (sec note 43), p. 113.
21
�The Christian Origin of Modern Science
Alexandre Kojeve
Translated by David R. Lachterman
"The Earth is a noble star."
Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, II, 17
Translator's Preface
Alexandre Kojive (1902-1968) is probably best known to
the readers of The St. John's Review as the author of the influential book Introduction a la lecture de Hegel, Paris
194 7; 1968, 2 abridged English translation: Introduction to
the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H Nichols, Jr., New
York NY 1969,· of the essay, rrThe Emperor Julian and His
Art of Writing," in Ancients and Moderns. Essays on the
Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo
Strauss, ed. Joseph Crospsey, New York 1964, pp. 95-113;
and of the section 117};ranny and Wisdom," in Leo Strauss, On
Tyranny, New York 1963,2 pp. 143-188. In addition he wrote
a three-volume study of the history of ancient philosophy, Essai
d'une histoire raisonnE:e de la philosophic paienne, Paris,
1968-1973, with a posthumously published sequel, Kant, Paris
1973. Most recently a manuscript dating from 1943 has been
published under the title Esquisse d'une phE:nomE:nologie du
droit. Expose provisioire, Paris 1981. The essay translated
below appeared in a two-volume collection celebrating the work
of his fellow-Russian and compatriot in exile, the d~'stinguiShed
historian of science Alexandre Kf!)Jri: Melanges Alexandre
Koyr€:, II: L'Aventure de !'esprit, Paris 1964, pp.
295-306.
The reader might be aware of KoJJve's gift for the "canularesque," a 1Jlut-on,'' as we might call it.
David R. Lachterman teaches philosophy at Vassar College. His translation
of Jacob Klein's The World of Plrysics and the "Natural" World appeared in the
Autumn '81 issue of The St. John's Review.
22
ew historical facts give rise to as much controversy as the connection between modern
science and technology, on the one hand, and
religion, namely, Christian theology, on the
other.
To be convinced of this we need only confirm that
the incredible strides m,ade by modern technology clearly
presuppose a theoretical science with a universal mission,
a science allowing the possibility of presenting all perceptible phenomena to the naked eye or to the armed [arme]
eye as visible manifestations of invisible relations and as
manifestations corresponding, in an absolutely rigorous
fashion, not to human speeches of any sort, but to
mathematical formulae or functions referring to these
phenomena in an exact way. We can, if we wish, call this
science "mathematical physics." However, it then becomes
important to make precise that this "physics" is not limited
to some part of the universe or to some of its particular
facets; supposedly, it must and can cover, without any
exception, everything which can be observed (that is, seen,
at least in the final analysis.)
No one will disagree that this mathematical physics
with its universal mission was born in western Europe
in the sixteenth century and that it cannot be found at
any other time or in any other place. No doubt, we can
find some small portion of it in our own day everywhere
in the world. However, it remains no less true that it is
only to be found when Christianity is present, if not as
a religion, then at least as the civilization we have no
reason not to call "Christian."
No doubt, it is not only the absence of baptism that
prevented and still prevents savages from devoting
themselves to mathematical physics. But what prevented
the subtle Chinese thinkers from doing so, the thinkers
who imposed upon enormous masses of people a highly
differentiated and extremely refined civilization? Why
F
WINTER 1984
�didn't the Indians, who benefitted from the Hellenistic
arts and sciences and in turn made many other peoples
the beneficiaries of those, why did they never try to surpass the exiguous limits of their heritage? How did it happen that many great Jewish thinkers, who very much
wanted Judaism to have a share in certain intellectual
efforts of the civilized pagans, never attempted to contribute anything at all to the development of those ideas
which could some day become a science in the strict
sense? And the Arabs- not prevented by Islam from actively contributing to the development and propagation
of the Hellenistic civilization they were the first to
renew-why didn't the Arabs try to mathematicize, for
example, the chemistry they discovered, instead of being content to assimilate and perfect only the pure or
celestial mathematics of the Ancients?
In short, no non-Christian people was able or wanted
to surpass the limits of Hellenic science. Now, the fact
is that the Greeks, who did not want or were not able
to pass beyond the limits of their own science, were all
pagans.
Since it is difficult to maintain that the Greeks were
pagans because they did not do mathematical physics, it
is necessary to suppose (unless we claim that civilization
is a chaos of completely unrelated elements) that they
were not able to work out such a physics because they
wanted to remain pagans (unless we admit, something
which would be perhaps misplaced in the present volume,
that Hellenic science and pagan theology are independent, but complementary, manifestations of one and the
same phenomenon, which would have a non-discursive
character since it would belong to the domain of action).
Now, in my opinion at least, this assertion is much
less of a put-on [canularesque] than it might seem at first
sight.
No doubt, in order to take this assertion completely
seriously, we would first have to agree about exactly what
"classical" Paganism is, or more precisely, about the
theology that served as the back-cloth to Greek philosophy
from Parmenides to Proclus and, hence, whether one
wishes it or not, to Hellenic science as .a whole. But, in
view of the clear impossibility of arriving at such an
agreement, I shall content myself with saying briefly what
Paganism would have to be for the assertion at issue to
be acceptable, if not accepted.
In opposition to Christian theology, 11classical" pagan
theology would have to be a theory of the double
transcendence of God. In other words, it is not enough
for the pagan, as it is for the Christian, to die (in certain
suitable conditions) in order to find himself face-to-face
with the Divinity. Even when he disencumbers himself
totally of his body (something of which the Christian,
moreover, has no need), the pagan is stopped in midcourse in his ascent towards God by a screen which, if
not opaque, is at least impassable, a screen, if one wishes,
which is ''divine" in the sense of trans-mundane or supraterrestrial, but in relation to which the god properly socalled is still and remains forever transcendent. The theos
of "classical" paganism is not only beyond the world where
the pagan lives. This theos is still irremediably beyond
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the 'Beyond' to which the pagan can eventually gain access after his death. By departing from the earth the pagan
is never on the path which could bring him close to his
God.
It matters little, moreover, whether this screen which
is thought to separate God from the world where the
pagans live and die is constituted, as it is for Plato, by
an ideal utopi~p_ Cosmos or, as it is for Aristotle, by the
ethereal heaven of the planets and the stars, a heaven
without any precise position in infinite, empty space, but
nonetheless itself quite spatial. What matters in both of
these cases is the absolute impossibility for the pagan as
well as for his god of breaking through this ideal or real
barrier. For, if the theory (contemplation) of the Platonic
cosmos noetos or the Aristotelian ouranos is a summit which
pagan man could not outstrip, neither in his lifetime nor
after his death, these same Ouranos and Cosmos are also
for him the extreme limit of the possible manifestations
or incarnations of his god. With the two exceptions of
what is in no place at all and what is in the heavens,
everything in the world of the classical pagans is everywhere
and always profane. Now, if the theos of classical theology
is the nunc stans of a point-like eternity or the uncountable, unique, all-embracing Whole, the transcendent
world where this theos manifests or incarnates itself cannot be other than a well-ordered ensemble of rigorous
relations, fixed from eternity among eternal and exact
numbers (it makes little difference whether these are the
ordinal numbers that Plato seems to assign to each of
the Ideas or the cardinal numbers which measure the
radii of the Celestial spheres in Eudoxian-Aristotelian
cosmology).* Inversely, in relation to this world which
is still, or already, divine, the profane world where we
live (it makes little difference whether it is the totality
of the cosmos or only the sublunary portion of the
cosmos) could not sustain truly mathematical or
mathematizable relations. Far from being one or formed
of orderable or denumberable unities, this profane world
is constituted by fluctuating elements, which, whether
they divide themselves incessantly in an indefinite manner or transform themselves insensibly everywhere and
always into their ''contraries;' are by definition purely
qualitative.
Thus from the point of view of classical pagan
theology, we can find "mathematical laws;' that is, precise
and eternal ratios, only where there is no matter at all,
or at the very least, where this matter is only a pure ether
inaccessible to the senses. From the point of view of this
theology it would be impious to search for such laws in
the gross and vulgar matter of the sort which constitutes
the living bodies which serve us temporarily as prisons.
And this is why for convinced pagans such as Plato and
Aristotle the search for a science such as modern mathematical physics would be not only a great folly, (as it
would be for all the civilized Greeks, who, because civilized, were predisposed to occupy themselves with the
*See Kojeve's Essai d'une histoire raisonnie de la philosophic patenne, Tome
II, pp. 96~ 100; 298-300 for further discussion of the character
of numbers in Plato and Aristotle.
23
�sciences,) but also a great scandal, exactly as it was for
the Hebrews.'
Let us admit that a believing or convioced pagan cannot do mathematical physics. Let us also admit that it
is not sufficient, in order to do mathematical physics, not
to be pagan or to stop being one, inasmuch as conversions of pagans to Buddhism, to Judaism, or to Islam
have not been very fruitful from the scientific point of
view. But is it really necessary to be or to become Chnstian in order to be able to devote oneself to mathematical
physics?
At first glance we would be tempted to answer "No."
On the one hand, for almost fifteen centuries Christian
civilization did very well without mathematical physics.
On the other hand, the promoters of modern science were
not, as a general rule, particularly well viewed by the
Church. However, these two arguments do not resist even
slight examination.
First of all, even if the fifteen centuries in question
were incontestably Christian, Christianity was far from
haviog penetrated all the regions of cultur~ in this epoch.
No doubt theology and, to a certain degree, morality (if
not law) were quite quickly Christianized (the Christianization of theology itself, besides, was by no means
complete). But, if we can see, for example in Gothic style,
the first specifically Christian art (because willfully contrary to the "nature" of wood and stone), we ought not
to forget that it took more than ten centuries before it
came about. As far as philosophy is concerned, the enormous effort of the entire Middle Ages had, if not as its
goal, at least as its result, to rediscover more or less
authentic (and therefore pagan) Platonism and then
Aristotelianism which the fathers of the Church were only
too ready to neglect in favor of their new, authentically
Christian theology, authentic, that is, for the most part
(at least if we abstract from the patently, if wellintentioned, N eo-platonic aberrations of an Origen or
a Marius Victorinus, and indeed, the put-ons which
Damascius published under the name of Dionysius the
Areopagite* * or the ironic writings of the classical
philosopher Clement of Alexandria). And the situation
was almost worse in regard to science properly so-called.
The Church, rightly and effectively preoccupied, before
everything else, with preserving the purity of the faith,
that is, the authenticity of Christian theological dogmas,
surveyed the sciences and philosophy with a rather
distracted (and often far from competent) eye, so that
paganism quickly came back into its own. This distraction of the responsible ecclesiastical authorities sometimes
went so far as to bring them to defend certain incontestably pagan philosophical and scientific theories against
apparently good Christians who wanted to Christianize
those theories.
Whether one likes it or not, the promoters of modern
science were neither pagans nor atheists, nor antiCatholics as a general rule (and they were the latter only
**See Essai d'une histoire, Tome III, pp. 526-527 for the attribution
of Pseudo-Dionysius' works to Damascius.
24
insofar as the Catholic Church seemed to them still
taioted with paganism). These savants were combatting
Scholasticism in its most developed form, namely, Aristotelianism restored to all of its pagan authenticity, whose
incompatibility with Christian theology was clearly seen
and clearly shown by the forerunners of the new philosophy (which, starting with Descartes, tried for the first
time to become Christian itself and which became so effectively by and for Kant.)
In short and at least in fact and for us, if not for these
forerunners themselves, it is because they, in th,eir quality
as Christians, fought against science insofar as it was
pagan that the various minor, mediocre, and great
('Galileos" were able to elaborate their new science, which
is still "modern" because it is our own.
Even while admitting that modern science was born
from a conscious and voluntary opposition to pagan
science and while affirming that an opposition of this sort
appeared only in the Christian world relatively late and
only in certain social milieus, we can ask ourselves what
particular dogma of Christian theology is, in the last
analysis, responsible for the (relative) mastery that Christian peoples (and they alone) exercise today on atomic
energy (a mastery, appearing in the period of the end
of history, which can contribute only to the prompt
reestablishment of paradise on earth, without ever doing any harm, physical harm at least, to anyone
whomsoever).
To answer this question, it seems enough to survey
rapidly the great Christian dogmas of the unicity of God,
creation ex n£h£lo, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, neglecting all the others (in any case, derivative or secondary and even reflecting, in certain cases, after-effects
[ sequelles] of Paganism).
Now, as for monotheism, its responsibility is clearly
irrelevant, since we find it in a pure state both among
developed pagans as well as among Jews and Moslems,
who are irremediably backward from the scientific point
of view. As for creationism, since we also find it in an
authentic form in judaism and in Islam, it is certainly
not responsible for modern science. Nor, moreover, is
the doctrine of the Trinity, of which pagan (N eo-)
platonism is far from being completely unaware and
which, even among Christians, is more an incitement
to "mystical" introspection or to "metaphysical" speculation than to the attentive observation of sensible, corporeal phenomena or to experiments with these. 2 There
remains the dogma of the Incarnation, which is, furthermore, the only one of the great dogmas of Christian
theology which is, from the point of view of historical
reality, at once authentically and specifically Christian,
that is, proper to all Christian thinking and to it alone.'
If, therefore, Christianity is responsible for modern
science, the Christian dogma of the Incarnation bears
exclusive responsibility for this.
Now, if this is truly the case, history or chrono-logy
are in perfect accord with "logic:'
In fact, what is the Incarnation, if not the possibility
that the eternal God can be really present in the temporal world where we ourselves live, without thereby los-
WINTER 1984
�ing any of His absolute perfection? But, if being present
in the sensible world does not lessen that perfection, the
reason is that this world itself is (or, has been or will be)
perfect, at least in a certain measure (a measure, furthermore, that nothing prevents us from establishing with
precision). If, as believing Christians affirm, a terrestrial
(human) body can be "at the same time" the body of God
and therefore a divine body and if, as the Greek savants
thought, the divine (celestial) bodies accurately reflect
eternal relations among mathematical entities, then
nothing any longer stands in the way of searching for
these relations in the world here below just as much as
in the Heavens. Now, it is precisely to such a search that
more and more Christians, beginning in the sixteenth
century, passionately devoted themselves, followed afterwards by some Jews, Moslems, and pagans. 4
But what exactly took place in the sixteenth century
in the domain of science?
Kant was probably the first to recognize the decisive
role played by the "Copernican Revolution'' in the genesis
of modern science. Now, what did Copernicus do besides
projecting the Earth where we live, together with everything found there, into the Aristotelian Heaven? It has
often been repeated that the Polish canon [Copernicus]
displaced the earth from the privileged position assigned
to it by pagan cosmology. People, however, have always
forgotten to specify that this position was only "privileged"
to the extent that it is thought to be the lowest thing in
the world (at least in the figurative sense of these words).
For all the pagans, just as for all the pre-Copernican
savants who claimed to be Christians, the Earth, with
all that is found there, was truly a "here-below;' in relation to which even the moon appears as something irremediably inaccessible and transcendent, as much in
virtue of the supposed "ethereal" perfection of everything
celestial as in virtue of the self-evident "heaviness" of
everything earthly. Now, this pagan way of viewing things
could not satisfy a man who, to be sure, wanted to do
science, but only on condition of remaining a canon and,
consequently, a Christian. However, it is not sufficient
not to be satisfied with all the ancient versions in order
to find a genuinely new way of seeing things. And if
Copernicus succeeded where many other good Christians
failed (without, to be sure, making any attempts to -succeed), it is because he displayed, not imagination, but
rather the enormous (intellectual) courage peculiar to
geniuses alone.
However that may be, it is Copernicus who eliminated from science every trace of"docetist" paganism,***
by having the resuscitated body of Christ followed into
Heaven by the totality of the terrestrial world where Jesus
died, after being born there. Now, whatever this Heaven
is for believing Christians, for all the savants of the era
it was a "mathematical" or mathematizable Heaven. To
project the Earth into such a Heaven is equivalent,
therefore, to inviting these savants to undertake without
***''Docetism" is the name given by some of the early Church Fathers
to the (heretical) doctrine that Christ's earthly and bodily career
was merely an appearance or semblance (OOx'l]at~).
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
delay the immense (but in no way infinite) task of working out mathematical physics. This is what Christian
savants did in fact. And since they did it in a world
already largely Christianized, they could do it without
raising too strong an outcry against madness or even
scandal.
Without a doubt, the mad Copernican projection of
our earth into the Aristotelian heavens provoked in the
latter a certain disorder which would have scandalized
a classical pagan. But truly Christian savants could not
take offense at this, nor did they. What was important
for them was, in effect, entirely preserved, namely, the
basic scientific identity of the earth and the heavens.
But, after a certain time, more exactly, after the time
when a certain tendency to become an atheist rather than
remain a Christian became manifest in the world (scientific and other), certain disquieting phenomena began
to appear in the unified terra-celestial universe (on the
high or low road towards becoming paradisical, without
waiting for a reconfirmation of its divin~ character).
This is because the multi-dimensional {{phase"
space, where the mathematical laws of modern quantitative and quantum physics necessarily apply even in
the smallest detail, resembles more and more the famous
Cosmos noetos which certain pagans qualified as transcendent and called utopian, because it was a place which
could not be situated, in relation to us, in any location.
Whereas, on the other hand, the world where the births,
the lives, and the deaths of men are situated in accessible and precise locations seems once again to be doomed
to the most complete disorder, rule by pure chance.
The atheistic savants of our day have thus witnessed
a sort of revenge of the ancient and pagan Plato ...
But, if this has been the case, this would be another
story altogether. A story, indeed, which would be all the
more different inasmuch as the {chance' brought once
again into the picture seems, in comparison with. chance
as the Ancients understood it, to be mathematizable itself,
or, indeed, divinized in the pagan sense of that term.
It is thought to be perfectly measurable and even- grosso
modo- precise, or in any case, eternal.
1. There is still, it is true, the Timaeus. However, I have excellent
reasons for believing (although I am probably the only one) that,
as in all of Plato's dialogues, the theories explicitly developed in
the Timaeus have nothing to do with the author's own ideas. In
his dialogues, Plato exhibits fashionable theories which he judges
erroneous and even pemicious, to which he is resolutely opposed,
where this opposition generally takes the form of a more or less
camouflaged persiflage, through which the theory being criticized is pushed to its absurd, even grotesque, consequences. (Cf.,
for example, Timaeus 91 d-e, where the famous "Darwinian" theory
of the origin of species which Timaeus expounds has birds descend from ... astronomers (of Eudoxus' type): ''As far as the race
of birds who have wings rather than hair, they arise, after a small
[sic] modification, from men without vvickedness, but light [legers],
who are preoccupied with celestial phenomena, but believe, in
25
�virtue of their simplicity, that the demonstrations one obtains of
these by sight are the most solid.") In the dialogue which now concerns us, Timaeus is none other than Eudoxus (who was commonly called "Endoxus," by reason of his great celebrity), who
irritated Plato enormously not only because he established a rival
school in Athens (where the Platonic theory of ideas was completely deformed with a view to a "physical" application and where
Plato himself was spitefully criticized for his lack of scientific
cultivation), but also and especially because the 'scientism' of the
Megarian-Eudoxian school so enormously impressed· the best
students of the Academy, Aristotle foremost among them. (Cf.
Philebus 62 a-d, where we can see what Plato really thought of
the sciences generally and of Eudoxian "mathematical physics"
in particular.) However this may be, the ironically inflated tirade
that ends the Timaeus and that Socrates listens to in silent reproof
(Timaeus 92 c), shows clearly what Plato does not accept in the
theory he is mocking. In and for this theory the world in which
we live is a sensible God (Theos aisth"etos), a contradiction in terms
for Plato, good pagan that he is, of the same kind as the pseudonotion of the squared circle. Now, if Plato says that according to
this theory the (sensible) world is divine, this is precisely because
it claims· to find in that world ratios, veritable mathematical entities. This is, therefore, the basic idea of mathematical physics,
namely, the Eudoxian attempt to find in sensible (spatia-temporal)
phenomena the precise ratios which subsist among ideal (eternal)
mathematical entities-and this is, for Plato, at once a scandal
and an act of folly. No doubt someone could say that Eudoxus
himself was a pagan as well. But, in the first place, nothing is
less certain, seeing that he could also have been an atheist. Secondly, what we know of his "mathematical physics" comes to us only
through Platds deliberately crack-brained mockery of it. Finally,
as others have quite rightly remarked, we have to wait for the sixteenth century to see the first attempt to give scientific coherence
to the ideas sketched in the Timaeus (if not by Plato ..--!'Socrates;'
at least by Eudoxus..--!'Timaeus"). Until that time, although generally taken quite seriously (with, however, laudable exceptions, including the philosophical Emperor Julian), the Timaeus only had
"mystical" or "magical" results (to say nothing of simple repetitions, whether ancient or modern, in which there is no attempt
at understanding the text). Furthermore, Democritus himself
could also have been an atheist. This does not stand in the way
of the fact that in a Democritean world one can only find room
for a pagan G~d, since God must necessarily be beyond, not only
sensible phenomena (purely "subjective" phenomena), but beyond
"atomic" (objective) reality as well.
2. Of course, the notion of the Christian trinity differs essentially
from the Nco-platonic trinitarian notion (which is, in fact, purely
Platonic in the sense that it can be traced back to Middle
Platonism, which is itself only a dogmatic version of authentic
Platonism) and the difference between these two notions has an
enormous philosophical (or, if one wants, "metaphysical") bearing. However, this difference is uniquely due to the fact of the
Incarnation of the Second Person. Now, it is evident that it is not
the dogma of the Incarnation that has been deduced from the
dogma of the Trinity. On the contrary, the Christian dogma of
the Trinity is a derived dogma, in the sense that Christianity
radically transformed the pagan trinitarian notion so as to make
it compatible with the fact of the Incarnation (as well as the fact
of the "gift" of the Holy Spirit, itself posterior to the Incarnation
and derivative from it).
3. What the Incarnation is for the Christian has nothing to do with
the self~styled "incarnations" which pagan myths or biblical tales
have in view: to become and to be a man is totally different from
taking on a human (or other) form (or appearance). Saint Augustine
saw this perfectly well and showed it dearly to the Christians (see,
for example, De Trinitate II, vii, 12 and IV, xxi, 31), while, on the
other hand, the adepts of Judaism never had any doubt about it.
4. Without a doubt the scientific consequences of the dogma of the
Incarnation were only drawn bit by bit (without, to be sure, any
appreciable help from the side of the Church). For example, scientific Paganism was able to preserve itself for so long a time in
the Christian world thanks to the preservation of the "Democritean'' distinction between "secondary'' and "primary" qualities,
which seemed an anodyne from the theological point of view. But,
the assertion that the color ofJesus' hair or the sound of his voice
are only "subjective" phenomena in fact amounts to the same
theological "Docetism" that the Church rigorously and effectively combatted as an obvious result of Paganism. It is no wonder,
then, that Christian science ended up by putting a stop to this
lamentable affair so that the responsible and competent ecclesiastical authorities did not have to intervene, at least not explicitly. Today, far from abstracting from "secondary qualities" on
the model of Detnocritus, who thought them despicable,
mathematical physics treats them with profound respect and seeks
to mathematize them; they have the same status as those entities
pagan sav;::nts judged to be noble, or even divine.
A Comment on Alexandre Kojeve's
"The Christian Origin of Modem Science''
Curtis Wilson
s this piece intended as an amusing joke, or should
we be profoundly edified? Even if it is less of a
canularesque or 'put-on' than may seem the case, as
Kojf:ve invites us to suppose, how are we to satisfy
ourselves that it is not appallingly irresponsible?
To be intellectually responsible, of course, is not the
easiest thing in the world, and I can only attempt to make
certain steps in that direction here. Let me confess at
I
Curtis Wilson is a tutor and former dean at St. John's College, Annapolis.
He has just completed a study of'Thc Great Inequality of jupiter and Saturn'
from Kepler to Laplace.
26
once that, when it comes to history, I am deeply
suspicious of the sort of intellectual operation in which
Kojeve engages: proposing single ideas as the causes of
complex, multi-faceted historical changes. Can Kojeve's
thesis, that Christianity is responsible for modern science,
and more specifically that the Christian dogma of the
Incarnation bears sole responsibility for the emergence
of that science, survive a serious examination in confrontation with detailed historical facts? Even if the answer
is 'yes: I think such examination will show that there are
meanings the thesis might easily be assumed to have
which are clearly false, and that it presupposes assump-
WINTER 1984
�tions that many of us do not share. Consider the following questions:
(1) Copernicus: Why did he hurl the Earth into the
heavens? Was this surprising act of thought connected
in some overt or covert way with the dogma of the Incarnation? That it was not so connected in an overt way
seems pretty clear. In his Commentariolus, written probably
as early as 1511-1513, Copernicus states his motives for
renovating astronomy in a clear and quite understandable
way:
the planetary theories of Ptolemy and most other
astronomers, although consistent with the numerical data,
seemed ... to present no small difficulty. For these theories
were not adequate unless certain equants were also conceived;
it then appeared that a planet moved with uniform velocity
neither on its deferent nor about the center of its epicycle.
Hence a system of this sort seemed neither sufficiently absolute
nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind.
Having become aware of these defects, I often considered
whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement of circles, from which every apparent inequality
would be derived and in which everything would move uniformly about its proper center, as the rule of absolute motion
requires. After I had addressed myself to this very difficult and
almost insoluble problem, the suggestion at length came to me
how it could be solved with fewer and much simpler constructions than were formerly used, if some assumptions (which
are called axioms) were granted me. 1
Essentially the same view is stated in the Narratio pr£ma
of Rheticus, the pupil of Copernicus:
... [my teacher} is far from thinking that he should rashly
depart, in a lust for novelty, from the sound opinions of the
ancient philosophers, except for good reasons and when the
facts themselves coerce him. 2
Copernicus was a convert to the Renaissance ideal
of classicist renovatio, which means something quite different from 'innovation' in our sense: it means to go back
to first principles. And in the Renaissance it was the
fashion to believe that the ancients knew deep and important truths, which in the long 'middle age' (the term
was invented by Cusanus a little before Copernicus was
born) had been lost from sight. Copernicus does not question the first principle that had been adopted in ancient
mathematical astronomy; on the contrary, he insists on
its being quite rigorously applied. The apparent inequalities of the celestial motions must be accounted for
in terms of strictly uniform circular motions: how else
could these motions be perpetual? As he indicates in
Revolutions IV.2, it would be absurd to attempt to account
for the apparent inequalities by postulating real inequalities-which is what Ptolemy had done.
Here we have Copernicus' own understanding of why
he did what he did. It is with this understanding, I should
think, that historical investigation of the Copernican
revolution ought to begin.
Not for a moment would I deny that Copernicus'
Christianity makes a difference in his thinking about
astronomy, but the difference it makes, when we compare his thinking with Ptolemy's, is that he is a creationist
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and Ptolemy is not. Copernicus thinks of the world as
a machine designed by the best artisan of all:
... When I had long considered this lack of certitude in the
mathematical tradition concerning the composition of the motions of the spheres of the world, I began to be annoyed that
no more certain theory of the motions of the machine of the
world, which was created for us by the best and most orderly
of all artisans, had been established by the philosophers ... 3
According to Kojeve, 'truly Christian savants' could
not take offense at Copernican doctrine, "nor did they!'
Well, Luther in 1539 referred to Copernicus as 'der Nan'
(the fool), and added: "But I believe in Holy Scripture,
since Joshua ordered the Sun, not the Earth, to stand
still." Melancthon, Luther's deputy, commenting on "the
Polish astronomer who makes the Earth move and the
sun stand still;' said: "Really, wise governments ought to
repress impudence of mind:' J. C. Scaliger, Italo-French
physician and scholar, published a book in 155 7 in which
he put Copernicus' name in the margin alongside the
recommendation that certain ''writings should be expunged or their authors whipped:' Maurolicus, a Sicilian
mathematician (1494-15 75), said: "Nicholas Copernicus,
who maintained that the Sun is still and the Earth has
a circular motion, deserves a whip or a scourge rather
than a refutation." The Italian astronomer Magini said
that "Copernicus' hypotheses are attacked by nearly
everybody for being too far away from the truth and absurd:' Clavius, the Italian mathematician, said in 1570
that "Copernicus' idea conflicts with many aspects of experience and the common opinion of all philosophers and
astronomers:' Quotations from both Catholics and Protestants could be multiplied, and just about all of them
are to the same effect, that Copernicus' hypotheses are
absurd; and some add that these hypotheses are contrary
to Scripture.
I know of no reference in the Revolutions to the dogma
of the Incarnation. If this doctrine influenced Copernicus'
thinking about astronomy, the effect can only have been
a hidden one.
(2) Kepler, Galile0 Descartes, Newton: Here, among these
most famous of the founders of modern science, do we
find the dogma of the Incarnation showing itself as influential, as determining their theological and
metaphysical and scientific thought? If influential it was,
it did not show itself as such.
The divergences among these thinkers go pretty deep.
It is in Kepler that the theological motives are most evident: the original idea of his celestial dynamics seems
to have come out of the notion that the 'signature' of the
Trinity had been imprinted on the very structure ofthe
Cosmos, the Sun being the image of God the Father and
Creator, hence the exerciser of power, while the stars of
the starry sphere were the image of God the Son, and
the space between, in which light and motive power
travelled from center to periphery and were reflected back
again, was the image of the Holy Spirit. But I don't think
anyone besides Kepler put much stock in this charming
idea: Kepler's harmonies were the object of much ridicule.
27
�Nor do I think one can very well argue that the introduction of dynamics into the skies had to come by this peculiar and idiosyncratic route- granting that the idea of
forces acting on celestial bodies was a very unusual one
at the time. We should also note that Kepler, inspired
as he was by cosmic trinitarianism, was not less evidently
inspired by Platds Timaeus, with its notion of a playful
demiurge, faced with the 'ananke' of the Receptacle or
the recalcitrance of matter. Kepler was ever ready to
acknowledge that the instantiation of beautiful
geometrical patterns in the world could fail to be exact.
That seems to be a pagan idea, and I think one may
reasonably doubt that it is really at home in the setting
of Christian theology.
Galileo was another who came to consider the world
as mathematically describable, but the route by which
did he regard it as logically entailed by any theological
doctrine.
There is evidence to lead one to suppose that Galileo,
like other Florentines of his time, living under a bad,
tyrannical regime, but retaining family memories of the
better times of citizen rule under the Republic, turned
to a kind of compartmentalized way ofliving and thinking. Energies that in the old days would have gone into
citizen activity were devoted to private hobbies, although
the yearning for a public role remained. For a man of
Galileds italianate sophistication, good taste did not
countenance the notion that all one's ideas could or should
be fitted together into a single grand scheme. Galileo was
not a bookish man or a dreamer. He made some use (no
doubt illegitimate) of 'Platonic' recollection; there are indications he was influenced by Pyrrhonist scepticism
he came to this conclusion was not at all the same as
(notice how often he has Salviati insisting that 'I don't
Kepler's. There can be some uncertainty whether Galileds
famous statement in the Assayer is fundamentally
methodological or metaphysical, where he says that "the
book of the universe is written in the language of mathe-
know' is a good response to a question). But he is not
matics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other
geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it:' I would tend to
opt for the methodological emphasis.
In any case, Galileo does seem to have been the first
man we know of who set out consciously to discover sim-
ple mathematical laws through experiment. Stillman
Drake has suggested that an accidental discovery by
Vincenzo Galilei, Galileds father, may have had a great
influence here: Vincenzo found that when strings of equal
length are stretched by weights in such a way as to produce consonant intervals, the weights are as the squares
of small whole numbers, where the small whole numbers
are inversely as the string lengths that give the same consonant intervals when the strings are stretched by equal
weights. Vincenzo had been hoping to prove, in opposition to Zarlino, that small whole numbers have nothing
to do with consonance or with pleasant-sounding inter-
vals. The result surprised him. Perhaps the young Galileo
was surprised, too. It may have been this that precipitated
him into a search that led to the discovery of a series of
beautifully simple laws: the isochronism of pendulums,
the relation between pitch and frequency, the law of free
fall, and so on. On Drake's supposition, the series of
discoveries had been 'triggered.' A good many important
scientific discoveries seem to have been similarly
serendipitous.
Fortune favors the prepared mind, to be sure, but
Galileds overt preparation had a great deal to do with
a partisan of any philosophical sect or system. As
polemicist and rhetorician for the new science (his selfappointed role), he was willing to make use of anything
apropos that tradition offered.
And what about Descartes: what was his relation to
Christianity? It is only God that can know, of course,
but we should not fail to recognize how dreadfully upsetting to traditional Christian thought were the Cartesian
doctrines. The Principia philosophiae was condemned by
the doctors of the Holy Office in 1665 as incompatible
with the Eucharist, or the doctrine of transubstantiation.
Reconciling Christian orthodoxy to the new science does
not appear to have been an easy matter.
Descartes was .q.o doubt trying to reconcile the Sorbonne to his scientific enterprise in his Meditations on First
Philosophy. But the Cartesian proofs for the existence of
God and the separate existence of the human soul cannot have appeared as a godsend for the faithful: Descartes'
God is a philosopher's god, immutable, incomprehensible, unresponsive to the prayerful.
As to what Descartes really thought about the dogma
of the Incarnation, that must remain doubtful. In the
Discourse on Method he makes it clear to the reader that
while conducting the most radical inquiry into first principles it is important to follow sedulously the customs
of the country in which one finds oneself. And one cannot forget what Descartes as a young man wrote in his
journal: that when he entered upon the stage of the world,
he would do so 'masked.'
My guess is that the legitimation of algebra and the
overcoming of scepticism were more crucial to Descartes'
classical taste in music, painting, and the drama); and
attempt at a grounding of the scientific enterprise than
any Christian dogma.
And finally, what about Newton? In the early 1670s
Newton, faced with the prospect of having to take clerical
as far as one can discover, it had nothing at all to do with
theology or the dogma of the Incarnation. There is no
doubt that Ga!ileo considered himself a loyal son of the
Church, and was utterly taken aback when its doctors
study of the sources of Christian doctrine, and reached
the conclusion that Athanasius had hoaxed the Church
into accepting the doctrine of the Trinity, for political
Euclid, Archimedes, engineering, certain scholastic
studies, and the arts (for Galileo prided himself on his
came to treat him as a potential enemy, or at least as an
erring son. He did not suppose his science to be incom-
patible with Christian theology, but neither, I believe,
28
orders as a professor at Cambridge, made an intensive
reasons. Somehow a royal dispensation was gotten for
him, and so he was allowed to remain professor without
taking orders. In later life, as warden and then master
WINTER 1984
�of the Mint, he had to pretend to be an orthodox Christian, but on his death bed he refused the offices of the
priest of the Church of England. He did not believe in
the dogma of the Incarnation.
But now suppose the Kojevian says: All ofthis is irrelevant. The founders of modern science failed to recognize the hidden factor that permitted them to do what
they did. That was the dogma of the Incarnation, the
sole doctrine in the world that could overcome the double transcendence of God in paganism.
But here-setting aside the fact that the pagans did
have their mystery religions, and that many preChristians and later non-Christians have denied the double transcendence of God- I want to ask what sort of
historical explanations we are to consider possible and
reasonable. I am not an Hegelian in historical matters
(Kojeve in the piece before us appears to be doctrinairely
so); I do not believe it is reasonable to see the almost
endlessly complicated history of human thought and affairs as the realization of the Idea. In the unprecedented
intellectual upheaval of the 16th and 17th centuries, many
factors were in play: the religious revolt or reformation,
which had political and economic as well as doctrinal
roots; the discovery of the New World, and all it did to
shake up traditional views; the internal disintegration of
scholastic thought through its own self-criticism; the
discovery of antiquity in a new sense, as a source of
wisdom and esoteric doctrine; the effect on thought of
those signal inventions, the compass, gunpowder, and
printing, all of them imported from China; the impact
of the printing of books on learning generally, taking it
outside of the universities and turning it over to autodidacts; and so on, and so on. All this mad restlessness
is due to the dogma of the Incarnation? Or perhaps it
is to be attributed to the invention of the horse collar and
triple crop rotation, leading to the result, as Lynn White
puts it, that the Europeans were full of beans? It was a
time of intellectual, political, economic, and religious turmoil, and very strange notions came out of dark corners,
among them the altogether astonishing notion of
mathematical physics. No doubt Christian thought and
belief had much to do with this particular outcome. I
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
would not myself be willing to go further, unless we come
down to particular cases.
The most surprising and outrageous statement in
Kojeve's whole piece, in my opinion, is the aside about
the "mastery that Christian peoples (and they alone) exercise today on atomic energy (a mastery, appearing in
the period of the end of history, which can contribute
only to the prompt reestablishment of paradise on earth,
without ever doing any harm, physical harm at least, to
any whomsoever)." This was written, we note, in the
1960s, after Hiroshima.
It is the hope of most of us, parents in fact or parentsto-be or parents in spirit of those who will live after us,
that life on this planet can continue, and can continue
to be basically good (as our untutored animal faith affirms it to be). And most of us, confronted ever more
unavoidably by the evidence of how rapidly and irrevocably humankind is raping the Earth, find ourselves
shocked into grim silence. In as dark a time as ours,
Kojeve's optimism is either a bad joke or fatuous.
Hegel's phenomenology of spirit is a rich revelation
of the dialectical modes of working of the human mind,
in its ever renewed confrontation with the Other. We
would do poorly to reject it out of hand. Just as surely
we would be less than intelligent if we were to .accept uncritically Hegel's account of the factual history of the
human spirit: among some shrewd and bold strokes it
includes much that is fantasy, ungrounded in the sober
truths about the ways in which cultures have in fact interacted. As for Hegel's arrogant optimism about the
fmal, Germanic age of the Absolute, may I assume that
it would be laughed out of court today?
I confess that au fin du compte I do not understand
Kojeve's intention in his piece on the Christian origin
of modern science. I yield to a vague though deep suspicion when I say: Caveat lector!
1. E. Rosen, Three Copernican Treatises (3d ed., New York: Octagon Books, 1971),
57-58.
2. Ibid., 187.
3. Copernicus, &1Jo/utiom, Preface and Dedication to Pope Paul III.
29
�What Good and What Harm
Can Psychoanalysis Do?
Wolfgang Lederer, M.D.
is about seven years since I last had the honor
of appearing before you. On that occasion, as I
recall, I was sore perplexed by the topic your dean
had assigned me. And today, once again, I find
the very simplicity of my title troubling and deceptive. You are no doubt all familiar with that story about
a psychoanalyst who, having been greeted by a colleague
with a cheerful "Good morning!" then puzzles in his own
mind, thinking: "What did he mean by that?" And thus,
with professional distrust of the obvious, did I scrutinize
today's topic: "What good and what harm can
psychoanalysis do?" This is the theme your dean assigned me, but what did he mean by that? Is this truly a factual question? Is it not rather a challenge, a very gauntlet
thrown at my feet, a taunt which scornfully demands:
what good, if any, can psychoanalysis do?- and which
sneeringly suggests that the potential harm, lurking in
the obscurity all around the analytic couch, could well
devour whatever good might come of it?
I feel thrown on the defensive, and like any debater
under attack I shall now reach for that somewhat
disreputable but effective gambit of asking for a definition of terms: Will my honorable opponent kindly define
for me the meaning of "good?"
My opponent, refusing to be drawn into the mire of
the abstract, thereupon answers me with strict reference
to our context: "People come to psychoanalysis;' he says,
"because they feel in some manner maladjusted; the good
they expect, therefore, is a better adjustment."
I
t
''Very well;' say I, "and it follows that, the better and
Wolfgang Lederer is a psychiatrist who practices and teaches in the San Francisco area. This article was delivered as a lecture on May 13, 1983, in Annapolis.
30
more perfect the adjustment reached through therapy,
the greater the good?"
"It would seem so;' says he.
''And is not adjustment, as in a delicate mechanical
instrument, that state of meshing of gears and levers and
what not, which permits the total to run most smoothly,
with a minimum of friction, heat, or noise, such that no
component attracts attention to itself and no further improvements need to be made?"
"Indeed;' says he.
"Does it not follow then;' say I, "that the individual
perfectly adjusted to and within his society is one so
smoothly attuned to the existing order that he causes no
friction and no heat, attracts no attention, opposes
nothing, demands or effects no change, is in fact standardized and therefore amenable to unit replacement like
a mechanical component and, in short, may claim as his
greatest virtue a total lack of individuality?"
"I admit;' says he, "that such perfect adjustment, to
the extent to which it could ever be achieved, would be
good for the established order- at least in the short run;
but that it would be akin to death for the individual:'
''And if total adjustment is akin to death, then perhaps
total non-adjustment is the true good? Then perhaps the
ideal man goes his own way without regard to society,
custom, or law?"
"Surely;' says he, "such a one would quickly run afoul
of the social reality within which he exists, and would
suffer destruction:'
"Quite so;' say I. ''And it would seem that the good
lies somewhere between total adjustment and nonadjustment, and we are merely left with the question as
to where, between the extremes, the greatest good may
lie. But who should have the wisdom to tell us that?"
"Surely not the psychoanalyst;' says he.
"Then perhaps we must approach things differently;'
WINTER 1984
�say I. "People come to psychoanalysis because they feel
maladjusted; but how do they know about their
maladjustment?"
"Because they are in pain!'
''And so perhaps the good lies simply in the relief of
pain?"
"There can be no doubt;' says he, "that both chronic
and acute pain are bad, and quite possibly harmful, and
that the relief of pain, whether physical or psychic pain,
is considered a great boon."
"Let us consider then, if you will;' say I, "the pain
inflicted upon a man by his conscience, the pain of wrong-
doing which we call guilt. Supposing a man is tortured
by the memory of having killed an enemy in battle;
should we not, if we can find a way, try to diminish his
guilt over such a killing?"
"That;' says he, "would alleviate a grievous harm."
''But what if, by chance, we succeed too well, and the
man were so stripped of conscience and guilt that he considered killing permissible, under any circumstances?"
"That would be inflicting harm, both on society and
on the man himself."
"So it is true of the pain of guilt -and perhaps of any
kind of pain- that both the excess and the absence are
harmful, and that there is a necessary amount of pain
which is· required for survival, and therefore good?"
"That comes;' says he, "from engaging in a dialogue
with a psychoanalyst:'
''You do me wrong, my friend;' say I, "for I am not
even a psychoanalyst:'
"Then what, may I ask, are you doing here? Are you
not an impostor?"
N
ow, let me permit my interlocutor to go back to
the waiting room of my mind whence I have
called him. And let me admit to you quite simply
that I interpreted the term "psychoanalysis" in the title
of my talk as no more than a popular label for a great
variety of psychological therapies; for were I to guess,
I would say that psychoanalysis proper-orthodox,
classical psychoanalysis- constitutes today less than one
percent of all psychological treatment, and has become
mainly a valuable training device for future therapists
of analytical orientation; whereas many other techniques
are, and have been, practiced with varying success. Of
this, let me give you some examples.
We are told that in the year of grace 1584, on the
tenth day of April, there was presented to the Most Illustrious and Most Reverent Archbishop of Cambray,
Loys de Berlaymont, by Monsieur Francois Buisseret,
Doctor of Laws, Archdeacon of Cambray, one Soeur
Jeanne Fery, aged twenty-two years, a professed religious
of the convent of the Black Sisters of the town of Mons
in Hainaut, it having been found that she was proved
to be troubled and possessed by evil spirits, to the end
that it might please the aforesaid Lord Archbishop to
recognize the fact and to advise suitable means for her
deliverance.
Jeanne Fery, we hear, was born in 1559. Her childhood was unhappy, for her father was a violent man who
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
drank to excess. Jeanne herself was gifted with a very
quick understanding and a good mind, and had a tendency to hear and gladly to treat of great and high matters.
One day her father, returning from the tavern at 6 dciock
in the evening, met his wife who had come out to seek
him with her child in her arms and, being angry with
her, he wished that the devil might take the child. In virtue of which the Devil had power to beset and hover about
the aforesaid child until she reached the age of four, when
he tried to gain her consent to his being accepted and
acknowledged as her father. He presented himself to the
child as a handsome young man, gave her apples and
white bread, with which she was pleased, and, as she later
wrote: "Since then I regarded him as my father by reason
of the sweets he brought me; and he spoke to me in the
same way [sic] until I reached the age of 12 years; and
he protected me, so that I did not feel the blows that were
given me:'
Jeanne had been sent to a convent school, but at the
age of 12 was removed to the house of a dressmaker, there
to learn a trade. The devil urged her to take full advantage of her new liberty and reminded her that it behooved
her to obey him in all things. Otherwise, she writes, "he
would torture me in ways which he showed me: and that
each person lived in the manner he taught me, but that
they would not confess as much to each other ... I immediately submitted to all that he could ask!'
She was then made to sign a document with her own
blood, renouncing her baptism, her Christianity, and all
the ceremonies of the Church: "This pact being sealed,
the paper was folded very small and I was made to
swallow it with an orange, which tasted very sweet until
I came to the last morsel, and that was so bitter that I
scarce knew how to endure it. And since then I have
always had a great detestation of the Church ... and
have used many insults against her ... being inspired
in all things by malice and sin!'
She nevertheless re-entered the convent of the Black
Sisters at the age of 14, there to begin her novitiate. The
devils became ever more tyrannical, but allowed her to
act and to work modestly, so that she aroused no suspicion and at 16 was permitted to take her vows and thus
to become a nun.
The devils now deemed her worthy of parodying the
sacraments and o:r~e among them, Sanguinary, came and
desired from her "not a dead sacrifice, but living, and
of her own body!' She wrote later: "Hearing all this, I
at length gave way to their will. Immediately, this evil
spirit entered into my body, carrying with him a sharp
knife ... with great cries and pains he cut a piece of flesh
from ... my body and, having soaked it in my blood,
went and offered it to the evil spirit, Belial. ... They
made me offer this sacrifice many times:'
Henceforth the devils kept her in despair and tempted
her to take her life. Through fear of being disgraced and
perhaps put to death by a court of justice, she listened
to their promptings. She gave them her girdle that they
might strangle her, but being unable to do so, they urged
her to slit her throat. Each time she attempted this, an
invisible presence stopped her. The devils would say:
31
�"There is some wicked woman guarding her." The woman
was later identified as Saint Mary Magdalen.
Meanwhile,] eanne, drained of all energy and unable
to declare the cause of her obvious ill health, was visited
by a doctor who could make nothing of the case and
prescribed remedies that were of no avail. Both her health
devils, she was to be placed that day for care and nourishment in the hands of Loys de Berlaymont, Archbishop
of Cambray, in whatever place he is or will be throughout
his life; and that he was to instruct her in the praise of
God and to answer for her conscience before God. She
thus became the only nun to have an Archbishop for her
and, even more, her character deteriorated. She wrote
confessor.
later: "When the last days of Lent came, I was sent into
the church, where I blasphemed God and cursed my
father, my mother, and the hour of my birth. I thought
only of despair, or of drowning myself, if I could find
the means and the strength. The devils ... left my poor
body without any human nourishment, and the nuns had
great sympathy with me when they saw the color of my
face, for I looked more dead than alive:'
Two days after being presented to the Archbishop,
The Archbishop was a man of benign character.
When the possessed nun was first presented to him, he
greeted her kindly and blessed her, and thereafter had
Jeanne was admitted to exorcism, and many sessions were
held until November 12, 1585-a period of nineteen
months. Her treatment was characterized by many
dramatic events. Thus at one point the devils, "as much
by reason of old injuries which they had inflicted as
through new wounds which they made at their departure, cast forth great quantities of blood and putrid flesh."
She was told that her illness was mortal and incurable,
and it was expected that within the space of three or four
hours she would die. Through the invocation of Saint
Mary Magdalen, however, after the patient had passed
out of her body, with her urine, twenty pieces of putrid
flesh, which gave off a horrible stench, the vehemence
of her suffering was appeased. At other times she endured
agonies, spasms, convulsions, struggles for breath, epilep-
tic fits, and nightly ravings. In May 1585, when she was
being returned from the Archbishop's house to the convent against the express wish of her holy protectress, she
attacked the Archbishop and other ecclesiastics with blows
and kicks, delivered with such violence that they feared
for their lives.
Eventually the devils reduced her to a state of
childishness and babbling; she was unable to recognize
any person except the nun who watched over her ...
and she wept continually. She was afraid to renounce the
devil who had been her father, and when he was to be
expelled she begged the exorcist on her knees to leave
her at least this one devil so that she would not fall into
imbecility. To console her for the loss of him, the exorcist promised her that he would be a father to her. From
that moment she was reduced to complete childishness,
ignorant of all knowledge of God ... and unable to say
anything except ''Pere Jean" and "Belle Marie," the names
of her exorcist and of her holy protectress. A little later
she also spoke of "Grand Pere" and on questioning her
the exorcist understood that she had taken the Lord Archbishop for her grandfather.
Some time later, having been brought before the
Archbishop at her demand, and being blessed by him,
she recovered her speech. At that the intervention of Saint
Mary Magdalen became apparent by means of pieces
of paper which, closely folded, were discovered in the patient's mouth. The first of these demanded that, in order
to set free ] eanne Fery from the possession of all the
32
her deliverance very much at heart. His intervention was
often decisive. She was kept in his house even though
the prolonged stay of a young nun in the house of the
Archbishop could not fail to surprise people; but when
at length he decided to send her back to the convent,
] eanne immediately suffered a severe relapse and in an
ecstatic vision of Mary Magdalen was told that her grandfather, the Archbishop, had incurred the anger of God
by sending her back to the convent. She was to return
to his house for a year, after which time she would be
fully relieved. When the Archbishop, to convince himself
of her condition, visited her in her cell, "she was im-
mediately seized by such torment, and her whole appearance was so greatly changed by the vehemence of
her sufferings, that the Lord Archbishop, fearing that
she might die suddenly, was forced to lift her up from
her bed:' This event caused him to lodge her thereafter
in his house, where she recovered her senses, having no
recollection of what had occurred. On November 12,
1586, she took the Archbishop's hand and said: "Today
I am restored and returned to my sisters. As to my food,
you are discharged of obligation. Nevertheless, you will
have charge of my conscience for the rest of my life:'
W
ell now: unless we take the possession by devils
literally-and even at the time the ecclesiastics
were not quite sure that they should -what I
have just presented to you is an instance of the successful,
and purely psychological, treatment of what today we
would probably call a hysterical psychosis. Is it then the
Roman Catholic Church that really invented "psychoanalysis?" Or at least: psychotherapy? And how is it possible that unquestioned good came of it?
Let me hasten to state that, in my opinion, between
exorcism and psychotherapy as it is practiced today, there
are some considerable differences; but what these two·
techniques may have in common, and why both of them
can be effective, I should like to discuss after I have given
you some samples of methods which may be much older
even than the Church, and which have survived to this
day.
Thus, some tribes of the African Gold Coast firmly
believe that there are witches which fly by night to
assemblies in out-of-the way places, there to engage in
cannibalism. The belief cannot be disputed, for it is not
the real, material body of the witch that is supposed to
be flying to such gatherings: it is the witch's spirit, her,
or his, Susuma that is involved. Similarly, it is not the body
of the victim that is eaten, but the victim's vital essence,
his Kla. Although a person's Susuma may leave his body
WINTER 1984
�without ill effect, the Kla cannot leave without causing
illness or death. If the witches steal away a man's Kla
and cut it up, he becomes mortally sick. If, relenting,
they reassemble the parts and restore them to him, he
recovers. But an already eaten or mutilated part of the
Kla-say, its leg-cannot be restored, and the victim's
leg will be lost or rendered useless. What makes this whole
matter particularly sinister is that the witches exercise
their mischief not against enemies, but precisely against
those nearest and dearest to them- the members of their
own village or their own family.
To meet this danger, numerous shrines exist in the
forest, each in charge of a practitioner of skill and ·renown,
whither go patients of various kinds, seeking aid: some
are self-confessed witches, bemoaning the evil they have
,wrought; others are victims of bewitchment, presenting
such ills as sterility, blindness, aches and pains, and
assorted misfortunes. Perhaps the most striking of all are
those terrified, anxiety-ridden people who, while protesting that they have never done any harm, feel
themselves being converted into witches against their will
and suffer a sense of impending doom.
The practitioner receives these patients with much
ceremony and ritual, thus demonstrating his status and
competence. He then submits each one to a painstaking
interrogation, ferreting out envies, spites, rivalries,
marital troubles, and kinship disputes, laying bare all
secrets. And, indeed, astonishing tales of guilt and misdemeanor often emerge. Then he sums up the situation
as he sees it, announces who should confess and apologize
and to whom, and gives out advice and reprimand. Some
patients promptly recover, but others have to stay at the
forest compound for a lengthy course of daily therapy
and ritual, in the process of which they form an intense
relationship with the therapist. Let me present to you
one such case, as it has been reported by a highly
reputable European observer:
Kofi, a farmer, was received into a practitioner's com-
pound for long-term treatment. When first seen by the
Western observer he was miserably thin, terrified, and
haggard. His malady began, he said, with sleeplessness
and nightmares, during which his Susuma was drawn
unwillingly away to join a band of witches. He developed
daily periods of blindness and became unable to hear
anything except the urging voices of the witches. He also
had abdominal pains, and his belly was scarred where
he had made cuts to let out the evil. In despair he had
went home energetic and confident of his power to remain well.
This account was published in the British journal of
Mental Science in 1955. Comparative psychiatry has since
established that similar beliefs and practices are to be
found not only all over Africa and among African populations in the Caribbean and the Southern United States,
but also in South and Central America, as well as among
the shamanistic tribes of Asia. It is surely reasonable to
assume that a practice so widely spread, prevailing among
peoples of various races and religions who had little if
any contact with each other, must also be a very ancient
practice, corresponding and ministering to a very basic
human need.
W
hat, given the myriad variants of the method,
·are its essential elements? I will not fatigue you
with further examples, but will attempt to
derive the common denominators from the systems
already mentioned: those of the witch doctor, of the exorcist, and of the psychoanalyst.
In each instance, two individuals are involved with
each other. One of them is designated the patient, and
he is invariably anxious about something. He may think
he knows what he is anxious about, or he may not. He
may experience all of his anxiety as such, or he may be
more aware of related symptoms, such as guilt, or depression, or some physical complaint. But in any case he is
suffering in a way that seems to him both incomprehensible and abnormal or even unnatural, and he badly needs
to be relieved of this suffering.
The other member of the therapeutic couple is a person of high status and respect in his society, believed and
believing himself to be in possession of esoteric and
powerful techniques for dealing with anxiety or its
derivative symptoms. This person, the therapist, has often
once been a patient himself and has thus experienced
and learned his skill as it was once practiced on himself.
By virtue of this experience he is not only armed to do
combat with the demons besetting his patient, he is also
himself armored against their onslaught. He sees himself,
and is seen by the patient, as having authority, competence, and immunity.
Normally, this is how a parent appears to a small
child. And, indeed, so long as the parents can handle
themselves in the world and are not overcome by anx-
stay in the native practitioner's compound, with daily
ieties of their own, their child finds with them all the comfort, all the physical and psychological nurturance and
healing it may need. Ideally, the child will carry this sense
of security into adulthood, will inherit from the parents
ritual and psychotherapy, he recovered his sight and normal hearing, though he was still languid and spent, sitting about on the ground, afraid to go out of the practi-
the conviction that fate can be faced, come what may.
But in fact, fortune has so many slings and arrows in
store for us that even the best prepared, even the strongest
travelled to a coastal town to consult a European-trained
doctor, who had found nothing wrong. After a few weeks
tioner's sight. But in his presence, he felt a sense of safety
among us are likely, sooner or later, to find themselves
and the belief that he was to be rescued. He stayed about
a year and the observer saw him many times. He gradually grew fatter, lost his haunted look and gained the confidence to go out alone. At the end he was a different
in predicaments, under pressures and stresses, they do
not know how to handle. Our parents, as we grow up,
tend to lose the status of authority we once accorded
them: we are no longer so sure that their wisdom is
curative or even relevant to what ails us. Worse still, we
creature, with his normal loquacity and sense of fun. He
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
33
�now hesitate to consult them, or to confide in our friends,
not only because we question their competence, but also
their interest: family and friends have their own stake
in our lives, they are not impartial, not disinterested, and
we suspect that their counsel may have more to do with
their needs than with ours. And further, the more they
are devoted to us, the more our own anxiety is likely to
affect them, to infect them, so that, far from offering
reassurance, they are likely to create a feed-back of anxiety which beclouds what should be clarified, and far from
leading to calm may escalate to panic.
So there is a need for someone in whom one can safely
confide, to whom one can confess one's fears, one's guilt,
one's sorrow. Con-fide: from the Latin: con fide: "with
trust:' Trust is of the essence; hence the importance that
the therapist be a person of stature in his culture. For
trust is culture-bound: a religious culture, such as that
of France in the 16th century, trusts tl'i~·priest, trusts the
exorcist, presents its very anxieties in religious terms. A
magical society, a witchcraft society such as that of the
Gold Coast, trusts the witch-doctor, and brings to him
problems of bewitchment. A supposedly scientific society, such as ours- or at least such as ours tried to be during the first several decades of this century-trusts the
scientist, the learned man, the doctor- comes to the
psychiatrist, the academically trained, diploma'd
psychotherapist.
But is a man to be trusted just because he has a
diploma? True, the M.D., the Ph.D., the M.S.W. or whatever other imposing and dubious letter-combinations may
follow a fellow's name, mean something, designate some
sort of training and preparation, some degree of professionalism. So does membership in assorted professional
societies, so do books and papers published by the
therapist, lectures given, reputations widely praised ...
But still, asks the prospective patient: What do I really
know about this particular therapist I have, on good advice of friends and after much hesitation, just called, and
who, diffident and hesitant at the other end of the line,
finally agreed to give me an appointment two weeks
hence? Can this fellow really understand what I will have
to tell him? And understanding, can he tolerate it without
getting upset, without judging and despising me? Will
he attend to my needs, my utterly unique predicament,
and not go by the textbook, or grind his own axe? Has
he the warmth, the humanity, the wisdom I need him
to have? Will he not let me down, betray me, as I have
so often been let down and betrayed?
Indeed: Confession is risky, and trust is a precious
commodity that needs to be earned. Confidences emerge
only gradually, as confidence grows. In this unique relationship, where all the risks seem to be on one side, the
patient tests and tests, and does well to test. Facts, pertinent but innocuous, emerge first; pressing anxieties next
and behind them, half-admitted, doubts, self-doubts, impermissible feelings; and behind these: phantasies, seductive, frightening, shameful, and behind such phantasies,
who knows: how much which has never yet been admitted to awareness, sleeping monsters one should have let
lie, monsters that should never be permitted to trouble
34
the sleep of reason ... All this takes time- hence the
long, and frequent, and intimate association with
therapist-witchdoctor-exorcist-guru.
All this takes courage, for we all lie to ourselves, and
are afraid to face the truth. We lie to ourselves about our
own actions and motives, we lie about what we do to,
and want from, others. We lie above all about our own
fears. We clothe them in pretexts and excuses and false
assurances and truly fear nothing more than to have to
confront them. And yet that is just what the guruexorcist-witchdoctor-therapist expects and demands, implying that we can trust him and that he'll see us through
this journey across our own inferno. He has nerve!
And for what? What good is to come of it? What
reward for risking so much turmoil and pain?
Gnoti seauton! said the oracle; Know thyselfl But why?
What for?
et us return to Kofi, the farmer, who was afraid he
would become a witch. Witches eat the Kla of their
own tribesmen, their own family, thus causing illness and death. Witch doctors pry into kinship disputes
and marital troubles: What did Kofi confess? Could it
be that he hated and wished to kill a handsome youngster
he suspected of carrying on with his, Kofi's wife? Or that
he wished to kill his wife, for the same reason, his wife
whom he loved more than himself? Did Kofi, the farmer,
go blind so he would not see his wife's flirtations? Did
he go deaf so as not to hear the gossip of the village?
Or take another one: Kotzo, a village clerk, powerful because he could rei'd and write. His relatives, he said,
had long been trying to destroy him and had finally decided to make him a witch. They first took away, he said,
the use of his right hand, so he became a failure as a
clerk. His hand, we are told, trembled severely whenever
he talked about it, until, after months with the witch doctor, he was cured. Did Kotzo, the scribe, admit to himself
in the end how much he resented his own relatives, and
his wife's relatives, all of whom mooched on him, the provider? How sick he was of working for them? How sick
of their envy, of their ingratitude, of their accusations
against him of arrogance and superiority? Could he go
back to work because he now could admit his- tribally
inadmissible- anger against his kin, and could tell them
to see to their own living?
But perhaps you can follow me better if I tell you
about a former patient of mine, a no-longer-all-that-young
lawyer. He had graduated from his law school near the
top of his class, some ten years before he came to see
me. He explained that he was deeply depressed and
discouraged because he had failed in five state bar examinations and therefore, all these years, had had to work
as a paralegal assistant of other lawyers, some of whom
had graduated long after him. He was filled with shame,
and dreaded the prospect of having to attempt the bar
exam, in the near future, for the sixth time. He wasterrified that he might fail again.
We worked at understanding his problem, and it soon
became clear that he was not afraid of failure, but of success. This was the story: His father, now dead, had been
L
WINTER 1984
�a judge and, at home, a vicious despot. The son had lived
in dread of him, and the father had despised the son.
Once, in a fit of anger, the father had screamed at him:
"You will never, but never, amount to anything, much
less be a lawyer." Two days before my patient's first attempt at the bar exam the father had suddenly died. "I
consider the magical rituals foolish and incomprehensi-
ble and who would be turned off and turned away by
all he saw."
''And would not Kofi the farmer:' says he, "be disappointed by your lack of ritual and feel that you cannot
help him?"
know this sounds absurd;' the lawyer said to me, "but
"This is so!'
I felt that my father had died so that I would be too upset
to face the exam. Now that he was dead, he seemed to
hover about me like an angel with a flaming sword,
"And it follows that, just as the witch doctor could
threatening me and proclaiming: 'thou shalt not enter
here: The law was to be, for ever and ever, his domain,
and I was to stay out. I sat for the exam anyway, but
I could not think, and of course I flunked:' With this insight, and confident that by identifying the villain we had
banished him, he took the exam for the sixth time-and
failed again.
Obviously, we had not completed our job. So we
searched further, and this is what we found: His parents
had had a bad marriage. His mother, deprived and lonely,
had seduced him into a near-incestuous intimacy, induc-
ing him to side in all things with her and against her
husband. This was the cause of his father's contempt for
him as a "mama's boy" who would never be a man. And
he, fully aware of his connivance with his mother, felt
profound guilt at having betrayed his father.
This recognition changed the whole picture. Father,
it now became clear, had had cause to despise him. It
was his father who was the aggrieved party, and he himself
the offender. He took a new and searching look, and with
a, to him, surprising and new infusion of compassion
not treat the lawyer, you could not treat Kofi?"
"Indeed, that is likely."
''And the same would be true for the truly religious?"
"To this day:' say I, "the truly religious, if not actu-
ally mentally ill-meaning: psychotic-but troubled in
mind and spirit, by and large prefer to go to their priest,
or minister, or rabbi, and there seek and find help; and
they would benefit little, if at all, from coming to see me,
even if they were willing to do so."
''And so it would follow:' says he, "that you had rather
they did not come to you, and that you have a certain
professional hostility toward religion, because it renders
people unfit to be your patients?"
"Not at all;' say I. "First of all, I am willing to
recognize and to approve of any therapeutic method that
works, and religion has certainly worked as a therapy
for a long time, and still works for very many people;
secondly, I am quite willing to treat a religious patient
within the context and in the terminology of his faith,
provided he grants me the right to do so. But there is
he came to view his father no longer as an ogre, but as
another indispensable condition that must be met!'
''And what is that?"
"He must not have a religious expectation ofme, he
must not expect me to perform a miracle cure. Just as
a weak and impulse-driven man, deeply unhappy, a man
who had reacted to the failure of his marriage by conducting several scandalous affairs, thus progressively aggravating his estrangement from his wife. We now came
I cannot cure by magic, so I cannot cure by the laying
on of hands, or by bestowing an amulet, or a blessing.
In other words, the patient must not expect to be able
to sit or lie passively while I do something to fix things,
across a few fragmentary memories suggesting that his
but he must be prepared, with some counsel from me,
to take remedial and innovative action in the face of his
father had actually attempted to win the son's love but,
presumably feeling he did not deserve it, had eventually
anxiety. There is a saying that God helps those who help
given up on him. And so my patient came to understand
themselves, and that, if you forgive the comparison, is
that while he need not hate his father, he also owed him
no obedience. He now saw himself as the victim of parental discord, and he accepted and forgave himself for the
degree to which he had cooperated in it. His guilt, he
felt, had been adequately atoned for by his six failures
at the bar. He presented himself a seventh time, and
passed easily.
even more true of the therapist, for he can only help those
who are willing to help themselves:'
"And does it then follow that, if your patients are to
see the remedy of their ills in actions they themselves must
undertake, that they must in the first place consider their
ills as due to past actions of their own, that they must
A
t
this point my interlocutor re-emerges, a puz-
zled frown on his face.
"I am quite confused now:' says he. "You present
the story of an American lawyer, treated by you; and of
an African farmer and an African clerk, treated by a
witch doctor; and of a 16th century nun, treated by an
exorcist; and you seem to say they are all the same? In
that case, does it not follow that your training is irrele-
vant, and that your lawyer could have gone for help, and
could have been helped as much, by the witch doctor?"
to some extent at least feel responsible for their own
predicament?"
"Quite true. And so, if, for example, a person blames
all his ills on society, and expects society to bail him out,
then I cannot help him; and this would be true, for instance, for individuals who have been taken care of all
their lives, whether by welfare agencies or by a rich family,
who have never exercised their own will or their own skills
but expect whatever they need to be given to them:'
''Are you saying that you cannot treat either the very
poor or the very rich?"
"I am saying that I can only treat those willing to ex-
"This does not follow:' say I; "for the witch doctor is
ert themselves; and for the very poor and the very rich,
not an authority in the eyes of the lawyer, who would
therapy would have to have, as a first and often most dif-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
35
�ficult phase, a period during which these patients must
learn that money- the absence or the unlimited supply
of it- is not the problem and not the cure of the problem, but that they must discover and use their own personal resources?'
"You make therapy sound quite laborious:'
"It is that."
''And so, for you, the best patient would be a vigorous,
hence physically healthy and probably youngish person
of above average intellect and personal endowment, who
takes full responsibility for his life, who wants to understand where and what he has done wrong and who is
willing and courageous enough to effect changes, no matter how difficult this may be. In other words: the person
most deserving of your help is the one least likely to need
it?"
''I must admit this;' say I. "But even such a superior
individual may and often does encounter problematic
life situations which he does not know how to handle,
or in which he finds himself feeling and acting in ways
he does not understand and which'defeat him, and for
such a predicament he is likely to seek therapy. And so
I further admit, unblushingly, that my patients are by
and large quite superior individuals?'
"I am surprised;' says he, "to hear you engaging in
such snobbish value statements."
"And I am surprised;' say I, "that you should assume
a therapist has no values, or ought not to have a value
system of his own."
"But then you are like a priest, and have your own
faith, and your own ideas of what would constitute salvation for your patients, and no doubt you expect your patients to accept your notions and to seek their salvation
according to your creed?'
''You have hit upon a very troubling issue;' say I. "I
must admit that I do have a creed, and that I have a formulation for salvation. I have it straight from the mouth
of my own patron saint, Sigmund Freud, who, when
asked about the goals of therapy, said: "To enable a person to love and to work:' This nut-shell formulation is
surprisingly comprehensive and apt, for I find that it
covers, in a general way, almost all the complaints and
difficulties which bring patients into treatment. But when
brings the possibility of chosing and controlling in what
manner one may act differently in the future, and such
increased self-control is the essence of whatever freedom
we are capable of."
"In other words;' says he, "a well analyzed patient can
go out and feel free to do just as he pleases:'
"You are now baiting me;' say I, "but I shall use my
own freedom and choose to interpret your remark not
as hostile, but as conveying your concern that I might
confuse freedom and license. Rest assured that I do not.
Licentious behavior, as I understand it, satisfies, and is
often the slave of, such appetites as greed, sex, or power,
in a manner that does not care for the harm that could
be caused. i doubt that anyone who can love would be
without care. The freedom I have in mind is the freedom
to choose one's responsibilities and to assume them:'
"I wonder;' he says, "how many of your patients come
to you saying they want the freedom to assume
responsibilities:'
"Now you are making fun of me, and I am of a mind
to send you away again. Of course this is not what they
say they want, or what they complain of. They have their
own therapeutic goals- most often the relief of some emotional distress, or the achievement of some limited ob-
jective. And just as I must guard against imposing my
values on them, so I must be careful to accept their own
objectives- unless, of course, they are, to my understand-
ing, self-destructive. No, for the patient, the good to be
achieved in therapy usually has a very specific shapesuch as the passing of the bar exam- but to me as
therapist it always seems to be a step in the general direction of increased freedom to love and work."
"I am sorry if I offended you", says he, "I didn't mean
to do that. What I really had in mind is the approaching
end of your talk, and the fact that you are also supposed
to dicuss the harm analysis can do. And it seemed to me
that, if therapy had the power to free individuals to do
evil, this would constitute harm."
"Indeed it would;' say I. ''And the matter is of more
than academic importance, for there have lately sprung
up certain faddish therapies which encourage their patients to do just that, to 'put #1 first; to be unhesitatingly
selfish in the most narrow and unenlightened way; and
it comes to specifics, ethical and moral issues of great
to the extent to which these therapies manage to remove
complexity may arise, and there I have to try my best
old and admittedly blind constraints without replacing
them with new and enlightened ones, much harm is
caused, both to the patients and to those around them.
This kind of supposed liberation lays claim to being a
to see and understand a given situation in terms of the
patient's own standards, and not to impose mine on hiin.
This is not always easy or successful, but I am aided by
another basic principle enunciated by Freud when he
said, using his own technical terms, "where id was, ego
shall be''-which I interpret to mean, in a slightly expanded sense, that it is the task of the therapist to help the
patient toward a maximum of self-determination, of
choice, hence of freedom. This, in fact, is the only function of insight: behavior can be modified without insight,
revolution, or even a rebellion, against established standards; however, the truth is it merely constitutes a delinquent evasion of responsibilities."
"
A
nd may I ask;' says he, "before you make me
vanish again, whether that is the only harm that
could come from therapy? Or are there other
and often is; but in that case one driven, or fearconditioned, or other-directed behavior pattern is merely
dangers?"
replaced by another which may be equally driven, or fear-
case of the nun,] eanne Fery. You saw how she disavowed
conditioned, or other-directed; whereas insight, an
her parents, and took for father or grandfather first the
devil, then the exorcist, and then the Archbishop. She
understanding of why one felt and acted as one did,
36
"Indeed there are, and they may be illustrated by the
WINTER 1984
�transferred, you might say, her feelings about the evil,
non-attentive and non-giving father to another figure,
one who was also evil but who was attentive and giving:
the devil; and later she switched again, and transferred
her feelings to the archbishop, a man who was, to her
mind, as a father should be, ali-good, and whom she forced
to be very attentive to her for the rest of her life. This
'transference; if I may now use the technical term, though
it is in some measure essential to the cure, also has the
potential for harm- if it is misused by the patient or by
the therapist?'
"And how did she misuse it?"
"I should think that is obvious. First she used her illness itself, painful as it may have been for her, to get some
attention and care she would not otherwise have received.
Thus she became, for instance, the only nun to have
an archbishop for confessor. But in addition she then used
him-meaning his authority-for her own advantage in
dealing with others. Today, it is not uncommon to hear
people say something like: 'I am supposed to get angry
with you, my doctor says so; or: 'My shrink tells me I
don't have to do the dishes' or similar more or less serious
claims in which the therapist is, without his knowledge
or consent, used as ultimate authority concerning issues
he knows nothing about. Such gains begotten by ills are
of course ill-begotten gains and totally improper:'
"Is that all?"
"No, there is worse. Both Jeanne's affection for the
archbishop- she, after all, never had such a good
'father'-and the advantages she derived therefrom induced her to demand that she remain his 'patient' for
ever. Such a demand, today, is not likely to be voiced
quite so blatantly, but it may be acted on without ever
being verbalized. And it is not only the affection for the
therapist or some improper advantages extracted from
therapy which may induce a patient to want to continue
indefinitely; it is perhaps above all the refusal to get well,
because getting well means facing anxieties which the
patient would rather avoid, and therefore, getting well
takes courage. Think, for instance, of a person with a
highway and bridge phobia. No matter how helpful it
may be to understand the causes of such a fear, and to
learn that fear itself is not harmful- it still takes great
courage to test such understanding and to drive out onto
a seemingly exitless freeway or a seemingly endless
bridge. The fear of the fear-the fear that one may panic
after all- is still there and must be faced. The wish to
postpone the moment of truth is quite understandable,
but any therapist who, today, would be as indulgent as
the archbishop, would be harming the patient by permitting the ill to continue indefinitely. Therapy rarely
needs to be a rush-job, but it must be clear from the .
beginning and all along, that it will not go on for ever:'
"You speak of the affection of the patient for the
therapist;' says he. "Is that not a euphemism? Is it not
because he or she is helpful and relatively nonjudgmental, and possessed of an experience of life that
comes from having observed so many lives. But even this
liking is not essential, and therapy can be successful
without it. On the other hand, some patients do fall in
love, and in such cases the therapist must be quite firm-
kind but quite firm-in pointing out that such feelings
have nothing to do with him as a specific individual, but
that they are due to the transference and would have occurred in just about the same way had the patient seen
someone else. This is not always easy to do. When a
beautiful and seductive woman declares her love to aperhaps lonely and unhappy- therapist, he may have a
good deal of difficulty within himself, trying to keep in
mind for his own use the explanation he gives the patient."
"Are you then saying that therapy also entails some
dangers, and possible harm, for the therapist?"
"Indeed, this is so. In the situation just discussed, the
therapist must examine himself, and scrutinize his past
behavior with the patient, to detect in what way he may
have subtly encouraged his patient to fall in love, or to
what extent such a development coincides with his own
secret phantasies. And if that is the case, then he must
admit that he is no longer serving the patient, but abusing the patient to his own ends, to achieve his own
satisfactions. That surely is a betrayal of trust and one
of the worst things a therapist can do. He must find ways
of putting a stop to it as quickly as possible."
<1\nd if;' says he, "the love of patient and therapist
for each other is to be seen as unreal, as a transference-
mirage, so to speak, does this not also hold for attachments oflesser intensity, and must they not equally
be terminated?"
<'The answer to this is yes and no. Even lesser degrees
of attachment, such as for instance an affection spring-
ing from a long and intimate collaboration (from a feeling of mutual understanding and compatability), may
induce a patient to hold on to the therapist, or a therapist
to try and hold on to his patient. If this happens, it is
clearly detrimental. Do not forget that the therapist gets
paid, and his pay should be his only personal gain. That
of course is never quite true, for he also gains in experience, and from the pleasure of success with his patient, and from the opportunity to associate with the often
highly interesting and accomplished persons who become
his patients. But once the main purpose of therapy sessions lies in the enjoyment of pleasant company, therapy
has ceased and the integrity of the relationship is compromised. Once this is recognized, therapist and patient
should agree that the time has come to terminate:'
'~nd that is the end of it?"
"No, that is still not the end of it. There are two
phenomena which tend to occur and which continue the
bond. The first lies in this, that the patient commonly
takes the therapist with him, as it were. That is to say,
well known that patients fall in love with their therapists?"
the patient, now no longer in real and regular contact
"Like most things well known;' say I, "this one con-
with the therapist, tackles problems which may arise by
discussing them with the therapist- in his own head.
After all, when you have associated with a person for
months or even years, you know pretty well what he will
tains a grain of truth and a whole bucket full of exaggeration. By no means do all patients fall in love with
their therapists. Most patients come to like the therapist,
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
37
�say about a given matter, or in response to a certain question. Such inner conversations with the therapist may be
quite helpful and may actually advance the therapy
beyond the point it had reached at the time of formal
termination. The other phenomenon is the persistence
of a special intimacy between the now ex-therapist and
the ex-patient so that, if the need should arise, they can
always resume their work together, and pick up just where
they left off, quite as old friends, who, meeting after a
long separation, may feel as close as if they had seen each
other just the day before. Such lifelong, potential
availability of the therapist is a great comfort to the patient, and may be sufficiently reassuring to make actual
resumption of therapy unnecessary."
"If I understand you right;' says he, "it still is true
no matter how benignly you put it, that the patient remains tied to the therapist- in reality or in his headquite as a lifelong student to his teacher, or even as a
vassal to his master. And you call that a higher degree
of freedom?"
"Let me answer this by recalling something I have
read about the training of a Zen monk. In Zen, there
is the same close and lengthy association between a
student-patient and a- master which we have found in
other therapies. It may in fact go on longer than most
others-a matter of five to ten years. Now what happens
at the end? At the end, when the student has reached
satori, or enlightenment, he may slap his master's face,
and walk away for good. And the master? He laughs,
and is happy. He knows that, by means of this slap, the
student has symbolized his freedom from the authority
of and attachment to the master. But does that mean that
the student, now a master himself, will forget his mentor? That he will not still be influenced by what he has
learned from him? Compare this to a formulation a
young patient of mine came up with recently: "It all
depends;' he said, "on whds in charge?' This seemed to
him a great insight -and it was. All his life, up to this
time, he had been embroiled in a paradoxical enterprise,
namely, to win the approval of, but also constantly to
oppose, all those who were important to him: his parents,
his wife, and lately myself. In the process he neglected
his own goals and, as might be expected, all his efforts
turned out to be self-defeating. But now, he felt, it was
finally he who was in charge, in the sense that he was
no longer compelled, slavishly, to obey or to oppose what
others expected of him; he could weigh matters in his
own mind, and affirm or deny as he saw fit. He conveyed to me a great truth he had discovered: "If I ever;'
he said, "if I ever gave up all inner resistance, if I ever
told you without any hesitation all that is on my mind,
38
then I would not deserve to be here, there would be no
point in coming to therapy: for it would mean that I have
no self."
He was, at this point, discussing his termination of
therapy. He was ready to terminate because he had
discovered, and affirmed, the validity and independence
of his own self, a self he had never fully revealed, much
less surrendered, in therapy, a self which was now ready,
in light of all his experiences in life and in therapy, to
make its own decisions. Without having to obey or reject me or any other authority-figures that preceded me,
he was now ready to be his own authority, to be in charge.
Surely, that is the opposite of bondage, quite properly
one of the definitions of freedom, and a fitting goal of
therapy?'
"We seem to have reached;' says my interlocutor, "a
comforting and cheerful conclusion, and therefore the
proper moment for me -and you- to vanish from this
stage. I shall do so immediately. You perhaps should, as
is customary, end with some sort of summation?'
ar be it from me to disregard the advice of my
daimon ; so I shall summarize as follows: Psychotherapy is a journey which two individuals agree
to take together. One of them, the patient, is, for whatever
reason, anxious and feels lost. The other, the therapist,
is, due to his training and experience, much less anxious, and confident that he may find, together with and
for his patient, a way out of perplexity, out of fear and
constriction into a realm of greater. freedom and a fuller
life. The patient begins this journey with a cerfain
measure of trust in the therapist, a trust based on the
therapist's formal qualifications and on his reputationjust as a tourist looks with a degree of preliminary trust
at an official tour guide. This trust has a "let's wait and
see" quality, and must undergo considerable testing before
it gradually turns into the confidence that permits a genuine "confession;' an open avowal and discussion of
hitherto hidden feelings and thoughts. This process may
or may not produce a greater understanding of one's past
and present actions, but in any case has little curative
effect unless it leads to a change in actual behavior. Such
an attempt at changing the accustomed modus operandi
is always frightening, and requires great courage. The
benefit to be attained is a higher degree of freedom accompanied by a higher degree of responsibility. The harm
that may come of it.derives not from the process proper,
but only from its abuse. Given sufficient awareness of
such potential danger, the trip of psychotherapy is one
of the most exciting, rewarding, and safe journeys one
can possibly undertake.
F
WINTER 1984
�Cordelia
There is no cause for her to utter Nothing.
The court is scarce attending: only we
Were given notice that with sudden truth
She'd dare to disconcert the elderly.
Love hasn't yet acquired several senses:
As what is played for, when we do not play
For money; as the scoreless egg at tennis;
As diagnosis when sopranos die.
Her
Can
The
The
sisters know, can trace the naughty circle,
crack the crown, can set the wheels awhirldouble rounds of Fortune and of Fire,
planetary orbs of Fiend and Fool.
The moonish O's in Fool are central cyphers,
But Nature must annihilate extremes.
Invoked, she'll teach her son to nullify,
And help the hangman carry out her crimes.
He'll act it awkardly, for Nature's artless
When counting down the virgin sacrificeUnlike the daughter, who, unleashing monsters,
Enunciates with suicidal grace.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
Poems by Elliott Zuckennan, a tutor at St. Jolm's College, Annapolis, appeared
in the Winter/Spring 1983 Review.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
39
�Aristotle's Account of the
Intelligibility of Being
James Carey
ristotle thinks human knowledge is possible
only insofar '!S things show us what they are.
The self-presentational character of Being,
its intrinsic intelligibility, is a theme Aristotle develops with a wide ranging investigation that runs through the better part of his corpus,
especially the logical writings, the Metaphysics, aod a group
of treatises on the soul and its functions. His argument
for the intelligibility of Being is complex and involves
many difficulties, but it can be made clear, at least in
outline, even if some of its finer shadings remain obscure.
By way of introduction to Aristotle's account, we
should consider briefly the problem of knowledge and
its object as he inherited it from his teacher. In the seventh
book of the Republic, Plato has Socrates speak at length
about the mathematical studies that have come to constitute tbe quadrivium of the liberal arts. Although they
are indeed learnable (as their very name- Ia mathematica-suggests), their objects do not occupy the topmost segment of the divided line, nor is the manner of
apprehending these objects the paradigm of knowing
(noesis)'. Socrates says to Glaucon:
A
Now with regard to ... [the arts] which we say reach some~
thing of what is, [namely] geometry and those following in train
with it, we see that they dream of what is, but that it is impossible for them to have a wakeful view of what is, as long
as they leave unchanged the hypotheses they use and are not
able to give an account of them. For if the starting point [or
principle-arch!!] is unknown and the middle and conclusion are
woven out of what is unknown, what contraption is ever going to change such [merely] consistent agreement [homologia]
into knowledge. 2
An expanded version of a lecture given at St. John's College, August 3, 1979.
Mr. Carey is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
40
To the extent that an argument is based on assumed
and unquestioned hypotheses, any conclusion reached
will be tainted by the assumptive character of the starting point. To be sure, this does not rule out the possibility
that consistency might reigu within the course of the argument. Assuming that we can state all the axioms and
rules of inference that govern the argument, we can say
that we know the premises imply the conclusions. Such
knowledge is not to be despised, aod this quite aside from
the fact that the Purest exemplars of these procedures, i.e.,
the mathematical disciplines, by infusing habits of precision and rigor can serve as preliminary training for
philosophy. Still, to arrive at insight into Being, into what
is fundamentally real, aod for Plato this is the eidi! in their
community with one another, the very direction, and consequendy the general style, of our thinking must undergo
a reversal. Socrates says that "by the power of dialectic,
discourse (logos) can reach up to the unhypothesized, the
arche of all that is:' 3 Logos makes this move by regarding
hypotheses not as principles of deduction but as something from which it can spring upward toward the arche.
Once this arche is reached, logos is able to proceed through
the domain of the intelligible "using eidi! themselves, moving through eide to eide, and ending in eidi!:'• For this to
happen the hypotheses as such must be "destroyed:''
Aristotle agrees with Plato that knowledge in the emphatic sense (noesis) cannot be realized by simply deducing what follows from assumptions. But Aristotle offers
a different solution to the problem of how one achieves
a knowledge that is not merely "hypothetical;' and this
difference in solution mirrors a difference in the evaluation of the "power of dialectic." Near the beginning of
Aristotle's treatise on dialectic, the Topics, we are told what
we can gain from a study of this art. 6 In the first place,
it is useful for training (gymnasia). 7 It enables us to have
more success in attacking a proposed subject for debate.
WINTER 1984
�In the second place, it is useful in general conversation,
for, having enumerated the opinions of the many, we are
said that some things are by nature known through them-
then able to converse with them on the grounds of what
they believe and to detect any misuse they might make
of the common opinions that guide their thinking. Finally,
and most importantly, we can employ dialectic in the
"philosophical sciences" to exhibit problems (aporiai) on
others are only known through other things. 13 Aristotle
calls the first principles immediate. What he means by
"immediacy" can be seen by attending briefly to a special
feature of his syllogistic theory. One type of syllogism
shows that A belongs to C because A belongs to B and
B belongs to C. We call B the middle or mediate term
because it is through B that we prove A belongs to C.
Hence we say that'~ belongs to C" is a mediate proposi-
both sides of a question, better enabling us to discern
what is true and what is false. In reading through the
Aristotelian corpus, we cannot help but be impressed by
the near ruthlessness with which Aristotle raises aporia
upon aporia not only against the positions he opposes to
his own but also against the very positions he intends
ultimately to advance as true. On the whole, he represents the positions of other thinkers with exemplary
fairness and often seems to have elevated distributive
justice to the rank of an intellectual virtue. The relentless
scrutinizing, the returning again and again to the beginning of a question, distinguishes Aristotle's attempt to
make Being come to life in logos as much as it does Platds.
On the basis of his acute sensitivity to the aporetic
in learning, it might be tempting to maintain that, for
Aristotle, dialectic and philosophy are somehow one, as
they at least appear to be for Plato. But this would be
an overstatement. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle contrasts
the philosopher with the dialectician and the sophist. The
dialectician differs specifically from the philosopher in
"the manner of his power . . . dialectic is tentative
(peirastike) concerning those things of which philosophy
is knowledgeable:'• This is emphasized in the Topics:
dialectic takes its point of departure not from what is
known to be true but only from commonly held beliefs,
out of which it develops distinctively dialectical syllogisms
as opposed to scientific demonstrations. 9 Its attempt to
selves (as we might say, they are "self-evident") whereas
tion. But if there were no mediate term "between" A and
C we would say that the proposition ''A belongs to C"
is an immediate proposition. Since syllogisms make use
of mediate terms to reach their conclusions, an immediate
proposition cannot be the conclusion of a demonstrative
syllogism. The immediacy of first principles, then, means
that they are necessarily indemonstrable and, conse-
quently, known only by virtue of their self-evidence.
That the principles on which a demonstration
depends must be (at least at the outset) better known than
the conclusions is cardinal to Aristotle's conception of
the nature of demonstrative science. It is true that he
sometimes speaks of "assuming" or even "believing'' the
first principles, but this occurs in special contexts, such
as when he is simply delineating the formal interrelationship of terms within a syllogism. In a number of places,
however, he insists that the archai must be knowable 14
A first principle is not, for Aristotle, something which
is merely probable; much less is it something arbitrarily
assumed for the sake of seeing what follows.
This unique status of the ultimate premises of reasoning requires that they be known in a peculiar and appropriately radical manner. Aristotle shows that no form of
circular reasoning can secure knowledge of them. 15 A
demonstrate first principles remains only that, an attempt
so-called circular demonstration would be a process both
(peira).' 0 In the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics, the
only passage of any length in Aristotle's works that is
focused exclusively on how we come to know the first
prior to the principle as conclusion-and posterior to it
principles of things, neither the term "dialectic" nor any
of its derivatives appears.
thing except in different senses. He also shows that the
form of a circular proof in its most general structure would
be the following, where "X" stands for the first principle
and ''Y" stands for the propositions that can be deduced
from it: Y follows from X, and X in turn follows from
hat makes it possible for us to know these.fi"rst
principles can best be answered by initially
considering what Aristotle means by this expression, "prOtai archai." He tells us that demonstrative
W
knowledge in the strict sense can emerge only when
dependent on principles which are first, true, immediate,
better known than, prior to, and causitive of the conclusions reached. 11 Without these conditions we can have
a syllogism, i.e., there may be a consistent interrelation
of reasons (syl-logismos), but not a demonstration, i.e.,
as starting point. And Aristotle takes it as obvious that
the same thing cannot be prior and posterior to the same
Y. But this is only a special case or, as modern logicians
· would say, a "substitution instance" of the transforma-
tion rule of hypothetical syllogism: "if Z follows from Y,
and Y follows from X, then Z follows from X:' All that
has been shown is that the initial proposition implies the
conclusion. In the substitution instance all we can infer
from '~ follows from x;' and "X follows from Y" is that
"X follows from X." We have established, at most, that
there will be no showing-from (apo-deixis), because there
will be nothing reliable from which such a showing could
be executed. The principles must be true because
knowledge can only be of the truth, 12 and they must be
first because, although what follows from them depends
on them, they cannot depend on anything else. All of
this is implied in the very sense of the word '&rche"-a
our first principle, X, implies itself. We have not shown
that X is true, but only that if X is true then X is true. Aristotle
observes that "it is easy to prove anything this way.' 16 Every
source or origin which does not simply initiate but
curiosity, an extreme case where, given six premises with
governs what follows from it. In the Prior Analytics it is
three terms all reciprocally predicated of one another,
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
proposition, whether tautological, contingent, or absurd,
implies itself, but the fact of this self implication
establishes nothing as to the truth of the proposition in
question taken by itself. Aristotle does show, as a logical
41
�we really have a circular proof. But this authentic sample of a circular proof is still based on assumptions that
are not necessarily known or, for that matter, knowable. 17
What Aristotle has shown in the opening chapters
of the Posterior Analytics is that the first principles of demonstrative science cannot themselves be demonstrated.
The foundations of reasoning cannot be reached by reasoning itself. As Aristotle says, to demand a demonstration of everything is the sign of a bad education. 18 But
this leads to scepticism only if one fails to realize that
he has at his disposal a means of knowing which is more
precise (akribesteron) and truer (alethesteron) than episteme
itself. 19 The first principles which this mode of knowledge
has as its object are divided into two categories, the archai that all the sciences share, namely axioms, and the
special archai employed by the particular sciences. These
principles are, in Aristotle's understanding, expressions
of the underlying order of what is. They are not simply
impositions of "mind" on data presented to, the subject
from an "exterior" world. Aristotle realizes that the problem of knowledge is best tackled by trying to determine
what accounts for the intelligibility of Being. It seems
that here Aristotle is in agreement with Plato. The one
dialogue devoted almost exclusively to the question, "what
is knowledge?''- the Theaetetus- tells us explicitly only
what knowledge is not. Being, as the community of eide,
hardly becomes a topic of thoroughgoing inquiry. Plato
seems to indicate that an answer to the question "what
is knowledge?" requires investigation into what it means
to be a knowable object.
In the Metaphysics Aristotle raises this question: does
it belong to the science Which studies Being to consider
the principles of demonstration? 2 0 This question is
answered in the course of the treatise. Since knowledge
is of what is, the problem of intelligibility is one with
the problem of Being. To understand what knowledge
is we have to ask the question, "What is Being?"
rom the start, it must be kept in mind that, according to Aristotle, Being is not a genus, a
"highest class" which somehow embraces members.
If Being were a genus it would have to be divisible into
subgenera which would be distinct from one another by
virtue of having unique "specific differences." For instance,
the definition of vertebrate is composed of the genus,
animal, plus the specific difference, having-a-spinalcolumn. A vertebrate is a kind of animal, but the specific
difference, having-a-spinal-column, is not a kind of
animal. The specific difference was brought in from "outside" the genus and was thus able to limit the genus to
give us the definition of vertebrate. In brief, the specific
difference is never a member of the genus that it limits,
although, of course, the sub-genus is. We should now
be able to see why Being cannot be a genus. If it were
divided into subgenera, the specific differences would
have to be brought in from "outside" the genus as it happens in every division. But in this case the genus is supposed to be Being itself. This means that the specific differences would have to be brought in from "outside" Being. But there is no region "outside" Being from which
F
42
specific differences could be retrieved to effect the division of this genus into sub-genera. If Being is a genus,
it is a genus unlike any other. 21 We shall shortly see
another, deeper reason why Being cannot be a genus in
any sense at all.
Aristotle tells us that Being or that which is (to on)
can be meant or expressed in many ways. 22 We can speak
of accidental being, of what just happens to be. For example, some child happens to be swimming. Aristotle
maintains that there can be no science of this sort of thing,
because such ways of being are not essential to what the
child fundamentally is, a human being. One does not
have to be swimming in order to be a human being. It
is obvious that there are art indeterminate number of such
accidental ways of being. Being can also be expressed
in terms of actuality (entelecheia) and potentiality (dynamis).
This child is potentially an adult-he is now in an incomplete way what he will later on be fully. But he is
not now just a potential being; he is now actually a child
but potentially an adult at the same time. Furthermore,
Being can be expressed according to the various categories
or modes of predication which answer such questions as:
what is it? of what sort is it? how much or many is it?
to what is it related? when is it? where is it? The child
is a human being, is blond, is three feet tall, is the son
0f a musician, is today at the beach, and tomorrow will
be at home. All of these ways of being are pertinent to
the child. But they are not all on the same footing. What
the child is is a different order of being than, say, the
size of the child. Still the size of the child, in some way,
is; the size of the child is not nothing.
To appreciate all of these distinctions for Aristotle's
understanding of Being, it is necessary to say soinething
about the ways in which different things can share the
same name. 23 Man and ox share the name "animal:'
Aristotle says that they are spoken of synonymously: neither
is more or less an animal than the other. A large box
and the bole of a tree share the name "trunk;' but are
spoken of homonymously: it is accidental that they are both
called "trunk!' Finally some things are spoken of
paronymously, such as a medical book, a medical prescription, a medical degree, and a medical instrument. It is
not by accident that these are called "medical;' nor are
they all called "medical" in the same way. They are called
"medical" because they bear a relationship to one thing
(pros hen) which is called medical in the preeminent sense,
namely, the medical art possessed by the physician. 24 Being, that which is, is also spoken of paronymously. All
things that in any sense are, quantities, qualities, relationships, places, times, etc., are always said to be with
reference to something which is, in a primary and dominant sense of "is;' what Aristotle calls '&usia." This term
has been variously translated: substance, essence, Entity, reality, being, real being, and beingness. None of
these is wholly adequate. r'Ousia" is derived from the
feminine present participle of the Greek word for "to be''
and seems to have had in customary usage the sense of
property, what is one's very own; and this sense of being
what is one's very own is preserved in an enhanced form
in Aristotle's employment of the term '&usia."We are go-
WINTER 1984
�ing to leave the word untranslated, in hopes that its meaning will become clearer in the course of our exposition.
Aristotle equates the question of Being, of what is
insofar as it is (on he on), with the question of ousia. 25
Unless one can gain some understanding of what it means
to be ousia, one can gain no insight into what it means
to be at all. But there is a special difficulty. Just as Being is spoken of paronymously, so also is ousia. In Book
Zeta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle designates several ways
one can speak of ousia. 26 Because ousia is the subject
(hypokeimenon) of predication, the underlying material
(hyle) which takes on different forms at different times
can be called ousia. But material is not the privileged
case of ousia. Material can be called (&usia" only because
it is an enduring fundament of change. From a piece of
marble a column can be formed and this column can
later be transformed into a statue. The form of the column disappears and in this disappearance of the form
is the disappearance of the column as such. But
throughout this, the underlying material, in this case the
marble, endures.
In another sense the sensible singular entity that is
a composite being, formed material, can be called ousiae.g. this horse I see standing in the meadow, this dappled gray thoroughbred, "this one right here" (tode ti),
I say, indicating it to someone standing beside me. In
the Categories, Aristotle says that such beings as these are
primary ousiai.2 7 But in the Metaphysics, after introducing the sensible singular composite as a candidate for
the title of (&usia'' in the primary sense, he says that such
things, those beings with which we are first familiar, "have
little or nothing of Being."" They lack the necessary
credentials. Ousia is primarily timeless Being, that which
has no history. It is what is under every condition, what
is simply changeless. It is that of which we cannot say
"it was not" or ''it will not be."
The argument of Books Zeta and Eta of the
Metaphysics leads to the conclusion that, among beings
composed of form (eidos) and material, that which most
deserves to be called "ousia)J is form. 29 That the eidos is
the fundamentally real, that which is primarily responsible for whatever Being and intelligibility are manifested
in the things that lie before our eyes, is a conception obviously of Platonic provenance. But Aristotle criticizes
the Platonic understanding of eidos, or, put more
moderately, the understanding of eidos holding sway in
the Academy. The eide cannot account for the Being of
things when they are separate from them, when they are
"yonder:' The eidos of a thing, of a tree, for example, must
somehow be in it. But this preposition "in" is somewhat
misleading. The eidos is not in the tree in the same way
the fibers of wood are in the tree. Its way of being in the
tree is analogous to the way a man's character can be
said to be manifested in his actions. His character both
governs his actions and reveals itself in them. The eidos
of the tree is similarly in the tree; making the tree what
it is and manifesting what it is. Because the eidos forms
the fryle into a sensible composite being, a tree, and at
the same time is that very being insofar as it is intelligible, the eidos is both the form of this tree and the species,
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tree. By translating the one word eidos sometimes as "form"
and sometimes as "species" we must keep in mind that
we are effecting a bifurcation of meaning that threatens
to render opaque the relationship of Being and intelligibility that Aristotle, just as Plato before him, is striving
to render transparent.
Let us consider again, for a moment, the relationship between the genus and species of which it is, as we
say, a member. The genus, animal, can be divided into
proximate subgenera, one of which is the sub-genus,
vertebrate. The sub-genus vertebrate becomes clear in
speech by a definition (horismos) in whch the relatively
indefinite (aoristos) genus, animal, is limited by the addition of the "specific" difference, having-a-spinal-column.
The resulting sub-genus is more definite (horistos) than
the genus, and its definition makes this explicit. By virtue of its relative indeterminancy, the genus is, in the
intelligible domain, material (hyle). And this is what
Aristotle says in the Metaphysics:
Concerning lryfe, some is intelligible (noCfe) and some is sensible (aisthCtC) and it is always the case in a logos [and a definition is a kind of logos] that one part is hyfe and one part is entrgeia
[being-at-work]. 30
and again:
Genus is spoken of ... as hylC, for that which has a differentia
... is the subject (hypokeimenon) which we call hy!C. 31
When Aristotle defines the technical expression
[to be or come] from something, he says:
'a tinos,"
The composite is from [or comes from] the sensible hyle, but
the eidos is from the hyiC of the eidos. 32
The hyle of the eidos when opposed to the hyle of the sensible ousia can only be the genus. Finally we have this
striking formulation:
If the genus does not exist without qualification apart from
the eidos, or, if it does, it does so as hylC ... it is evident that
the definition is a logos [made up] of differentiae. 33
This conception of the genus as intelligible material
should not be misunderstood. The genus shares with the
sensible hyle only the general trait of relative indeterminateness with respect to that of which it is the hyle. 34
By understanding the genus in this way, Aristotle is able
to solve a cluster of related aporiae.
In Book Beta of the Metaphysics, he argues that if the
archai are universals, they will not be ousiai, because each
ousia is "a this:' On the other hand, if the archai are particular (we might say individuals) there will be no
knowledge of them, because knowledge (episteme) is of
universals. This opposition suggests that knowledge of
ousia is impossible. 35 The solution to the aporia consists
in noting the precise relationship of the eidos to its
superordinate genera. Genera are divisible into subgenera and these are again divisible into sub-sub-genera
and so on. But this division, which is accomplished by
limiting the genus in question with a specific difference,
cannot go on forever. Eventually something is reached
which cannot be divided. What is reached is something
43
�entirely determinate-so determinate that it is an indivisible unity. Being devoid of all indeterminancy, it is in
no sense hyle, intelligible or otherwise. It is the eidos, or
as we say, the species. Let us say that the eidos we are
considering is the eidos, horse. We might think we could
continue dividing as follows: grey horse, grey horse
weighing fifteen hundred pounds, grey horse weighing
fifteen hundred pounds running through the meadow at
5:00 in the afternoon, etc. But these would be accidental divisions; other things besides horses can be grey, or
weigh fifteen hundred pounds, or run, or be in a meadow
at 5:00 in the afternoon, etc. So the eidos differs sharply
from the genus on the one hand and the composite beings that lie before our eyes on the other hand. Both the
intelligible genus and the sensible composite have
something indeterminate about them, and the root of
this indeterminancy is hyle, intelligible in the case of the
genus and sensible in the case of the sensible composite.
Consequently, although Aristotle often speaks of the particular composite "individual" as <tode tz/' at the heart of
the Metaphysics this expression is transferred to the eidos
which is then contrasted with the particular. 36 "Tade tz~ ''
a this, turns out to be a more appropriate designation
for the definite and unique eidos than for the particular
sensible composite. We are told at the end of Book Mu
that knowing the universal is knowing only potentially,
knowing something indefinite like hyle. 37 If I know only
that something I see is an animal, my knowing of it is
not fully actual. If I know that it is a horse and I know
what it means to be a horse, then I know the eidos, the
essence, a term frequently used in apposition with or as
a substitute for ousia. 38 The Greek expression for what
I am translating as "essence" is <to ti en einai»which means
roughly the what-its-very-Being-persistently-is, an expression that is never used of the hyle, the genus, or the sensible singular composite. When I know the essence of
what I encounter, I know the thing for what it is, I know
actually and not just potentially. The eidos is not a universal like other universals, i.e., a genus, a class under which
something is subsumed as a member. It is not an indefinite one over many, but a definite one within many.
On the other hand it is unlike the particular in that
whereas there are, for instance, indefinitely many horses
there is only one eidos, horse. Since then the eidos or
essence is the primary instance of ousia, at least among
beings composed of form and material, and ousia is the
primary instance of Being, it seems that the Being of a
thing and its eidos coincide. 39 The genus on the other
hand, as intelligible hyle, is nothing actual. This is the
second reason why Being cannot be understood as a
genus. According to Aristotle, Being, in the full sense,
is what is actual, not what is merely potential. 40
till, we have thus far left unclarified the mode of
our access to the eidos. What is first for us in the
order of cognition is, according to Aristotle, a sensory encounter with a multiplicity of particulars- namely .
perception (aisthesis). In what follows, I shall, to avoid
S
44
unnecessarily forced locutions, translate <&isthisiS"
sometimes as "perception" and sometimes as "sensation:'
There is no distinction between sensation and perception in Aristotle's treatment, nor do I intend one. 41
Aristotle says that perception is a kind of "being
moved and acted upon."4 2 Whatever there might be in
the soul or in the dispositiort of the sense organs that
would enable the subject to perceive, the act of perception itself is seen as the effect of something external to
the one who perceives. The perceptive faculty (to
aisthetikon) is itself a mere potentiality, 43 and Aristotle
argues that what is potential cannot actualize itself but
must be actualized by something else. There must be,
in what is perceived, something presenting itself, something which by moving or changing our perceptive faculty
and acting upon it brings perception into full actualization. Aristotle makes an analogy with fuel in this connection. Fuel cannot actualize its potentiality for burning by itself; what is needed is something else, namely
fire, actually at work. Aristotle accordingly tackles the
problem of perception by focussing on its object, what
so to speak "ignites" the perceptive faculty, namely the
perceptible eidos.
Now, though the sense of touch is the most fundamental form of specialized perception, at least in the sense
that all animals- all living things which perceive- have
it,44 sight is singled out as the sense which most of all
makes us become familiar (gnorizein) with things and
reveals differences among them. 45 It is true that hearing
plays a greater role in the attainment of practical wisdom
(phronesis), but its role is accidental (kala symbebekos)
because it is not discourse itself which is audible but
rather the words (otwmata) which are themselves only
symbols. 46 Furthermore we are told that it is sight which
is primarily responsible for the perception of the common sensibles- shape, motion, rest, number, size- those
sensibles which can be apprehended by more than one
sense. 47
In the De Anima, we are told that the object of sight
(apsis) is the visible (horaton). Aristotle then says that this
is color. •• But immediately afterwards he tells us that the
object of sight is what the color is upon, i.e., the body
itself. Aristotle is not maintaining that the color and the
body are two distinct objects of sight. The body is visible because it is colored. The colored body has, as Aristotle puts it with characteristic concentration, the cause
of its visibility in itself. 49 The body has its color, its color
belongs to it, and when its color is seen it is seen also.
The color and the body are not somehow stuck together.
We should understand the color along with the shape
as the visible presentation of the body. In fact we do not
depart from Aristotle's intention but only from his manner of expression if we say that the color is the body insofar as it is visible, i.e., the color is the body qua visible.
Aristotle argues that color brings about sight by effecting a movement in a transparent medium (air or
water) which forms a continuum between the surface of
the object and the eye. He says that it is the very nature
of color to set in motion the transparent and thus to bring
about vision (assuming that a being endowed with the
WINTER 1984
�capacity for sight is present). If there were no medium
but only a void between the body and the eye nothing
could be seen at all: color cannot set a void in motion.
It should be emphasized that, though it is the medium
which directly acts on the eye, it is the color which is
seen, and this is because the medium is transparent
(diaphanes) and cannot itself be seen but only seen
through. Furthermore the medium is not transparent except when light is present. Light is in fact defined as the
actuality (energeia) of the transparent qua transparent. 50
In the absence oflight the medium remains only potentially transparent. Light is furthermore said to be the
presence (parousia) of fire, the absence of fire being
darkness. We are also told that light is the color of the
transparent. This does not mean that the transparent has
a color proper to itself but only that, when lit up by the
presence of fire, it communicates to the eye the color of
the body seen through this medium. The essentials of
the treatment of sight in the De Anima can be condensed
into a single sentence: A body becomes actually visible
when a medium such as air or water between it and the
eye is made completely transparent by the presence of
fire and set in motion by the color of the body, i.e., by
the body itself qua visible.
It is striking that the treatment of sight in the De
Anima is focussed almost exclusively on the object of sight.
This is of course consistent with Aristotle's general procedure of understanding the subject, so to speak, in light
of the object. The soul as perceptive has no function of
its own other than to receive the sensible eide; taken by
itself the faculty of perception is nothing actual at all but
only a potential for such reception. 51
The treatment of color and transparency in the De
Sensu adds a few important observations to those of the
De Anima. Transparency is said to be common to bodies
and not just to the air or water between them. 52 When
the transparent is indeterminate ( aoristos) as in air or water
(as when one opens his eyes under water) then it is the
nature of light to reside in it. But this "same common
nature or potentiality;' i.e., the transparent, when it is
in determinate bodies has a limit. We thus arrive at a
refined definition of color: "the limit of the transparent
in a determinate body."53
That Aristotle says color is the boundary of the
transparent in the body and not the boundary of the body
itself is probably in order to distinguish the definition
of color from that of shape. 54 Nevertheless, since every
body has within it the transparent and this is not
separable from the body, 55 the boundary of the
transparent within the body, the color, would coincide
with the boundary of the body itself, the shape. For this
reason, color can be regarded (with shape) as constituting
the limit of the body. And since the eidos manifests itself
in the limit of a thing, in what differentiates it from other
things, we can regard color as part of the sensible eidos
of body. Obviously, if bodies lacked any color at all they
could not be distinguished from one another. Eidos, in
general, has the characteristic oflimiting a being so that
it is set off from what it is not and apprehended as what
it is.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
We have in this section limited our discussion to sight
as a paradigm of specialized perception. Much could be
said about hearing, smell, taste, and touch that is relevant to Aristotle's general theory of perception, but for
our purposes it is necessary only to call attention to two
important features which these senses share with sight.
In the first place, not only is the color of a body
treated as the body itself qua visible, but the sound of
the body is the body itself qua audible, the odour of the
body is the body itself qua object of smell, and the taste
of the body is the body itself qua object of taste. This
theoretical observation is supported by our normal
linguistic usage. We speak of hearing the sound of the
trumpet and of hearing the trumpet itself, of smelling
the fragrance of the rose and of smelling the rose itself,
of tasting the sweetness of the sugar and of tasting the
sugar itself. In none of these cases do we, at least at the
level of ordinary experience, suppose or intend to speak
as though we are perceiving two different objects, a sense
datum· and a body. Aristotle's account of specialized
perception gives a theoretical justification for this prescientific attitude. In the case of touch Aristotle tells us
that we experience the differentiae of body qua body. By
this he means the primary elements of which a body is
composed, earth, air, fire, and water, i.e., the various combination of hot and cold, dry and wet. 56 It is through
the sense of touch that we perceive the material out of
which the body is composed. This should not be taken
to mean that through touch nothing "eidetic" reveals itself.
Indeed earth, water, fire, and air can be differentiated
from one another only on the supposition of their possessing something {~idetic» of their own. The so-called "prime
matter" would not be any one of these, but rather what
they have in common as elements in spite of their specific
differences, and this has no existence independently of
these elements. 57 But if it did, which would contradict
Aristotle's general theory of hyle, it would not be accessible to perception because this is defined by Aristotle
as precisely the reception of perceptible form without
hyle. 58 The same holds true of touch as of the other senses:
in feeling the wetness and coldness of the ice, we feel the
ice itself; the wetness and coldness of the ice is the ice
itself qua tangible.
Secondly, not only sight but the other senses also apprehend their proper objects through a medium either
external, air for hearing and smelling, or internal, the
liquid on the tongue for tasting and flesh itself for
touching (because, as Aristotle says, the organ of touch
is not the flesh but is within it. )59 Aristotle maintains that
"we indeed perceive all things through a medium:'60
Perception is a mediated mode of apprehension. This does
not mean that the medium usually distorts the perception (though it may occasionally do this); rather, because
of the necessary presence of the medium for perception
to take place at all, 61 the soul is never, by mere perceiving, in immediate contact with the Being of things. And
this is of capital significance.
Of course, our experience is not limited exclusively
to present objects. We also have imagination. Although
nothing can possess imagination unless it already has
45
�perception, imagination can be called into play when we
are not actually perceiving, e.g., when we close our eyes
and imagine what we have just seen.
But imagination also differs from perception in the
degree of falsity which can pertain to it. Aristotle tells
us that "perceptions are always true but imaginings (phantasiai) are mostly false:' 6 2 One reason for this is that the
individual senses are naturally designed for the specialized function of apprehending their proper objects, and
error, when it occasionally occurs, is due to some accidental and unnatural flaw in the sense organ, either congenital or acquired. But error in the apprehension of the
common sensibles, on the other hand, occurs even when
the senses are functioning normally. Although what
Aristotle calls the "common sense" can directly (i.e., according to its own nature- kath' auto) apprehend the common sensibles, it necessarily operates in and through the
specialized senses. Because none of these senses is designed expressly and uniquely for the perception of the
common sensibles there is a proneness to error in the
common sense that is not found in specialized senses (i.e.,
when they are apprehending their proper objects). Since
"an image is an affection of the common sense faculty" 63
the proneness to error of this faculty would account for
some of the falsity that characterizes imagination.
But this would not justify Aristotle's contention that
"imaginings are mostly false." A further consideration is
that the exercise of imagination is "up to us whenever
we wish to do so!' This, according to Aristotle, distinguishes imagination from perception. 64 We can manipulate images in such a way that they bear little resemblance to the sensible objects which give rise to them.
Nonetheless, the most important reason why "imaginings are mostly false" consists in the fact that images must
differ from sensible objects. If we, through the exercise
of imagination in remembering something, were to have
before us an image completely true to a sensible object
we had previously experienced, the vividness of this image would block out, distort, or at least interfere with
our present perceiving. For an image to be regarded as
an image of some sensible object it must differ from it,
at least to the extent that we are able to recognize the
image as an image and not take it to be the sensible object itself. When images are so vivid that they are taken
for sensible objects, hallucination is the result; and Aristotle is aware of pathological states that are based on inability to recognize images for what they are. 65
There are then these three reasons why "imaginings
are mostly false:' In the first place images are affections
of common sense and this faculty is prone to error. In
the second place, we are free to distort our images (as
we say, "to fantasize") in a way that we cannot distort
the sensible objects that are present to us in perception.
Finally, because an image is only an image, it must differ somewhat from the sensible object that gives rise to
it, and this differing is necessarily a distortion (and hence
falsifying).
Aristotle raises the aporia of how it is possible to
remember something absent when what is present is only
46
an image and not the fact itself (to pragma) which gave
rise to it. 66 This affection (pathos) exists in the soul67 and
is a kind of picture (zographema ti), a kind of figure (typon
tis) of the object perceived. 68 How is the perceiving of
an affection present in the soul related to the remembering of something past and absent? Aristotle answers by
pointing out that the image can be regarded in one of
two ways. It can be focussed on within the soul and considered as an object of contemplation (theorema) in its own
right or it can be regarded as an image of something else.
In the latter case alone is it taken as a likeness (eikan) and
a memory aid (mnemoneuma).
It is to Aristotle's credit that he did not say that the
image is what we remember. On the contrary, it is by attending to the present image that we remember the absent
thing of which it is a likeness. Aristotle sees clearly that
in being aware of an image flS an image we remember the
thing itself. If we were to remember only present images
(whatever that might mean) and not their past originals,
we would have no way of knowing that the images remembered are indeed images of the originals. And so, for
Aristotle, remembering what is past is simply being aware
of present images of the past precisely as images of the past. 69
What perception and imagination (in the form of
memory) allow us to encounter are the perceptible eide
of things. But in the De Anima, Aristotle says that it is
one thing to encounter something perceptible, his example is water, and quite another to know its essence, what
it is to be water. 7 For this we need something more than
perception. The recognition of the intelligible eidos is a
function of what Aristotle calls nous. 71 The sensible eidos
is the thing insofar as it presents itself in the mediated
mode of apprehension that is perception, and perception is our first, and the lower animals' only, encounter
with Being. Images are stored in the soul and what they
contribute to intellectual insight (noesis), at least for us
mortals, cannot be minimized. "The soul never has intellectual insight without images ... the noetic faculty
(to noiftikon) knows the eide in the images:' 72 Nonetheless
nous, since it discerns a single eidos in a multiplicity of
particulars, operates on a different plane. When this insight occurs, the soul is in an £mmediate mode of apprehension. There is no medium, as there is in perception, between the knower and that which is known; they are
somehow one. 73 Noes£s is the only mode of apprehension
that Aristotle calls "being in contact" (thigein). 74
In speaking of the shift from the perceptual beholding
of an array of particulars to insight into the intelligible
e£dos at work in them, we should not overlook the nuanced
distinction between the shape or figure (schema) which
is but one among several common sensibles, and the
richer sense of shape connoted by the term «morphe."The
schema is only the visible or tactile limit of a thing. Considered in isolation from the thing of which it is the
schema, it becomes, when suitably purified by the
dianoetic activity of the mathematician, the subject matter of geometry. {'Morphe," on the other hand, a term often
used in apposition with or as a substitute for «e£dos" by
Aristotle, carries with it a sense not only of shape, but
°
WINTER 1984
�of shapeliness, comeliness. The term occurs as early as
the Odyssey, in the Phaiakian episode. In Book VIII
Odysseus speaking to Eurylaos says:
There is a certain kind of man less noted for beauty but the
god puts a comeliness [morphen] on his words and those who
look toward him are filled with joy at the sight, and he speaks
to them without faltering, in winning modesty, and shines
among those who are gathered and people look on him as a
god when he walks in the city.1 5
Later, in Book XI, Alkinoos tells Odysseus:
You have a grace (morpht) upon your words ... you have told
the story of the dismal sorrows befallen yourself and all of the
Argives. 76
"Morphe"is also a term that occurs frequently in biological
treatises. Aristotle uses it to designate the principle that
regulates a being in its wholeness. The schema is but the
surface evidence of the morphe. When the morphe is
discerned, one is no longer beholding the perceptible
eidos, the being insofar as it presents itself to the perceiving soul; one is in contact with the eidos in the full sense
of the word, the ti en einai. One is engaged in noesis. And
this is not an act of abstracting. The morphe can no more
be abstracted from what is seen than it can be abstracted
from a piece of poetry. This term, "abs~raction;' occurs
frequently in Aristotle's writings but it almost always
refers to the act in which we disregard what the things are,
and everything else about them except their quantitative
determinations. In abstraction, as opposed to noesis, Being is overlooked. The very expression, "things-byabstraction" (ta ex aphaireseOs), is Aristotle's abbreviation
for the objects of mathematics. 77 One is hard pressed to
find passages in his writings where the term refers to the
apprehension of an eidos, and the reason is simple: if the
eidos to be abstracted were not already ''seen" by nous in
the particulars, one would not know what to abstract, and
this "seeing" of the eidos renders a subsequent act of
abstracting superfluous. Furthermore, abstraction of the
eidos would turn it into something literally abstract,
something less real than the sensible composite, a product of an act of "constitution?' The mathematicals have
this character for Aristotle, though not for Plato. The
eide have this character for neither.
The eidos, in Aristotle's understanding, is then both
the essence of a thing, what it really is, and the presentational "expression" of the thing. The soul cannot force
things to display themselves to it. They are of their own
accord on display. If they did not have a principle of selfpresentation intrinsic to their very Being, if they were,
as is sometimes said, "really just matter;' it would be impossible to account for any experience of them at all. 78
But, according to Aristotle, not a single being, intelligible or sensible, is ')ust matter." The world around us is
saturated with eide, and Aristotle takes great pains to show
that its beauties are manifested in the most unlikely
regions of nature. 79 Aristotle cannot even playfully call
this world, as Socrates can, a "barbaric bog?' 80 It is, for
him, the cosmos. Even the motion of things is but an
THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
effect of the radiance of the divine into the world, as
prime mover, final cause. And this motion can be made
intelligible by a science of nature, a physics, which he
argues is an impossibility for the Platonists. 81
We are now in a position to get at least a tentative
understanding of how the first principles are known. The
archai of the particular sciences, at least the definitions
they employ, are the results of the transfer of insights
gained by nous into the medium of logos. Since the eide
are unities, there is a problem as to how that kind of logos
which specifies what a thing is, a definition, is not a
"heap;' a pile of words. Aristotle holds that the definition is itself a unity, one part of which, as was mentioned
earlier, is hyle and one part of which is energeia. The genus
and the specific difference both together express what
the eidos in question is, both in its relation to other eide
and in its own uniqueness. Aristotle argues that only
when the definition is construed in this way can it be
seen that the integrity of the eidos is not ruptured in
speech. This unity is not a "sum" of genus ·and specific
difference quantitatively added together; it is a unity of
form and material, i.e., of form and formed. Definitions
articulate the interrelationship of ousiai, their community
in an intelligible cosmos. 82
The archai common to all the sciences, the axioms,
are also known by nous. The so-called "principle of noncontradictiOn" is expressed as an arche of being itself. "It
is impossible for the same thing both to be present in
and not be present in the same thing simultaneously and
in the same respect." 83 The basis for this assertion is the
clear insight into the determinateness of an eidos. At any
one moment of time, an eidos and its own privation cannot both unequivocally be present in an individual thing.
We see that this is so but we cannot demonstrate it,
because, Aristotle says, nothing is more certain than this.
We cannot even imagine it to be otherwise, for our images are formally governed by the very archai which govern
the sensible objects of which they are images. On the
other hand, if someone is willing to speak and denies this
principle, we can show bizzare consequences of his denial,
consequences he might not have anticipated. 84 And here,
incidentally, dialectic can be put to good use. Aristotle
argues that t\>is principle cannot be denied by anyone
who intends his discourse to exhibit a tincture of intelligibility and not dissolve into aberration. We can show
someone who denies this principle that both his speech
and his actions indicate that he does not believe what
he is saying, but we can do no more than this. And if
he chooses not to speak we can do nothing at all.
t this point we are faced with an obstacle which
is perhaps ultimately insurmountable. It may be
objected that Aristotle's theory does not adequately explain this shift from perception to noetic insight. What faculty do we have that permits an infallible insight into the way things are as opposed to a merely
empirical generalization? The objection is, in a sense,
A
47
�well taken. Aristotle's answer seems to be that this move-
perience, the temporal and labored discursiveness of most
ment is not entirely our own doing. He says in the De
Anima that the potential intellect is passive to an intellect
which is fully active, an intellect which makes all things. 85
It is the nature of a potential intellect, as it is the nature
of anything potential, that it cannot actualize itself. The
potential intellect, then, needs the active intellect to "actualize" it, to bring it to actual noesis. This active intellect
engages in insight (noei) without ceasing. We are certainly
not aware of continuous intellectual insight, and it is hard
to see how this most privileged mode of knowing could
be taking place within us "unconsciously" and yet
incessantly. 86 These considerations lead one to the suspicion that, in Aristotle's scheme of things, this active
intellect is God at work within our souls when our potential intellects have been properly made ready. The objection that this intellect is exclusively our own because
it is said to be active in our souls is somewhat lame. It
fails to take into account the fact that our souls are not
entirely spatial and that the divine intellect is entirely
non-spatial.
A real difficulty consists in determining the relationship of this active intellect to the divine intellect of Book
Lamda of the Metaphysics. There, he is said to have only
himself as object of his thought- he is insight into insight (noesis noi!seos). 87 This is a description of divinity
which those of us who admire Aristotle have trouble convincing others is not mysticism. It is difficult to see what
is so lovable about noesis noesios, such that it can be said
to be the ousia on which everything depends. 88 It sounds
too much like an indivisible point that is simply aware
of being an indivisible point, and so forever. And it is
hard to square this austere conception with other things
Aristotle says about divinity, namely that it is life, it experiences pleasure, it is entelecheia, it is good. Aristotle
suggests a way out of this aporia. Just a few sentences after
designating God as noesis noCseOs, he says that in things
which have no hyle, the knower and the known are the
same. 89 Now the eide are, considered by themselves,
without hyli!, and so is the divine intellect. In fact, both
the eide and God are called actuality. Accordingly, the
divine nous could know the eide, could indeed be the eide
as fully known, and thus be spoken of as only knowing
himself. If the objection is raised that he would then be
a plurality, the response would be that the eide constitute
a whole, a community (which would explain why they
animate a cosmos and not just a pile of things, unrelated
and spread out in space and time). Such a community
of eidi! would not be a simple unity, but neither would
it have to be a mere plurality. And if the community of
eidi! at its highest level of intelligibility is so organized
that, given a powerful enough intellect it could be apprehended not discursively but "at a glance;' it would not
be distinct from the intellect knowing it. This would be
an attractive solution if we could imagine the totality of
eide organized so comprehensively that "seen'' by a divine
intellect it would be "seen" as a unity. But we cannot.
In spite of the flashes of insight which light up our ex-
of our thinking itself prevents us from intuiting the whole
precisely as it is, and from imagining how an "all" could
be a "one."
Perhaps the most quoted passage from the Metaphysics
in recent times is the following:
48
And indeed in times of old as well as now and also forever,
what is enquired about and what forever causes perplexity is
[the question of] what Being is, that is, what is ousia? 90
If we realize that a comprehensive understanding of ousia
requires that we gain a clear insight into that which is
in the most unambiguous sense- eternal, changeless be-ing, actuality devoid of potentiality, God- then we see
that the question, "What is ousia?" is essentially an aporia
for us. Our noesis is, after all, dependent on images, and
there is no experience which could supply a store of images in which we would be able to discern the essence
of the divine. As we noted earlier, to know something
is (for Aristotle) to become one with it, and whatever
occasional share we have of divine activity, we certainly
do not in this world simply become one with God. 91 But
if we cannot adequately know the divine, and Being
without qualification is located only in the divine, it would
seem as though, however intelligible the beings in the
cosmos are to us (and their complete intelligibility
ultimately hinges on the intelligibility of all their causes,
including the final cause which moves the cosmos itself),
the intelligibility of Being in the unqualified sense cannot be maintained. Yet we must not overlook the fact that
the divine is, after all, luminously intelligent to itself. The
problem, then, lic;s not with the intelligibility of the
highest instance of Being, God, but with the intelligibility
of the whole of Being, God and cosmos. If God is not
intelligible to us, we surely do not know the whole; but,
by the same token, if the cosmos is not intelligible to God,
he does not know the whole either. We have considered
two ways of addressing this problem. The first would be
to argue for an identification of human nous in its active
mode of knowing the cosmos with divine nous. The second would be to argue that the divine nous in its simplicity could engage in a noesis of the multiplicity of eidi! which
organize the cosmos. The first way would entail the second, though the second way would not necessarily entail the first. There is evidence in the De Anima and the
Metaphysics that Aristotle is aware of both these "solutions"
(and their attendant aporiaz), but he explicitly embraces
neither.
In the Parts of Animals, Aristotle says that knowledge
of divine things is hard to come by and yet worth more
than knowledge of things around us, just as a "glimpse
of those we love is more pleasant than seeing other things
with precision:'92 In Book Lamda of the Metaphysics
Aristotle attempts to provide us with a glimpse of the
one who is loved, so to speak, "absolutely!' But the nature
of this Being and His curious relationship to the cosmos
in general and to man in particular remains, for us, an
aporia.
WINTER 1984
�1. In the sixth book of the Republic (509 ff.), Socrates makes use of a divided line to illustrate how the various grades of Being and awareness
are related to one another. For a fine discussion of the divided line analogy,
see Jacob Klein, A Commentary of Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1965) pp. 115 ff.
2. Republic 533b.
3. Ibid. 511b.
4. Ibid. 511c.
5. Ibid. 533c. To my knowledge no one has ever made complete sense of
these mysterious passages. Aristotle would argue that the dialectical ascent Socrates describes must itself be guided by a pre-dialectical knowledge
(noesis) of the distinction between same and other, and he would wonder
about the origin of this pre-dialectical insight. For good accounts of the
koinonia tOn eidon as found in Plato's dialogues and in Aristotle's criticisms
of Plato and the Platonists, see Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematics and the Origin
of Algebra (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968) pp. 61-100, A Commentary
on Plato's Meno (op cit.) pp. 122 ff., and Robert Williamson, "Eidos and
Agathon in Plato's Republic," in Essays in Honor ofJacob Klein (Annapolis:
St. John's College Press, 1976) pp. 171-187.
6. Topics 101a25-b4.
7. This term is frequently used in the Topics, rarely elsewhere. Politics
1297a17. See H. Bonitz, Index Aristotelicus, (Berlin, 1870), p. 163.
8. Metaph. 1004b25. ·
9. For a discussion of the change that dialectic undergoes at Aristotle's hands,
see Friedrich Solmsen, "Dialectic without the Forms," in Aristotle On Dialectic, ed. by E. G. L. Owen (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1968).
10. Cf. Post. An. 79a29-35, Topics 101b2.
11. Post. An. 71b20; cf. Topics 100a29.
12. Cf. Metaph .. 1017a34, 1051b2.
13. Prior An. 64b35. Cf. Physics 184a17, Nic. Ethics 1095b3. If the "gnorimos"
in these last two 'passages means "known" or "familiar'' and not merely
"knowable" (cf. Lidell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, [Oxford at the
Clarendon Press, 1968] p. 355; but cf. Smythe, Greek Grammar, [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956,] p. 237, section 858.9), a curious
problem emerges. Granted that it is we who know that which is known
to us, who is it who knows that which is known without qualification (haplos)? cf. supra pp. 47,48.
14. Post. An. 71a1, 72a29, b5, b19, 99b16 ff.,Mataph. 997a6, 1005b11-17,
Nic. Ethics 1139b33.
15. Bk. I, ch. 3.
16. Post. An. 73a6.
17. Ibid. 73a8 ff. The proof is as follows:
1. AaB 4, 6
2. BaC 5, 4
3. CaA 6, 5
4. AaC 1, 2
5. BaA 2, 3
6. CaB 3, 1
Every line is justified as a consequence of two other lines (written to the
right of each line) by a syllogism in the first figure. The proof obviously
works only on the assumption that A, B, and C are reciprocally predicable
of one another.
18. Metaph. 1006a5, cf. 1005b2.
19. Post. An. 100h9-11.
20. Metaph. 995b7, 99626-997a16; cf. 1059a24, 1061b17.
21. Ibid. 998b22, cf. 1070b1; cf. Ernst Tugendhat TI KATA TINOS, Eine
Untersuchung Zur Struktur und U rsprung Aristotelischcr Grundbegriffe
(Freiburg/Muenchen, Karl Alber, 1958) p. 27 n. 24.
22. To on legetai pollachos- the opening clause of Book Zeta, Metaph. 1028a1 0;
cf. 1003a32 for a similar formulation.
23. Cat. 1a1-15.
24. Metaph. 1003a32-b19. Concerning the character of the pros hen equivocals,
see the invaluable book by Joseph Owens, The Doctrine OJ Being In The
Aristotlean 'M'etaphysics'(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies,
1951) pp. 107-135 and 259-287.
25. Metaph. 1028b4.
26. Ibid. 1028a30-1029a33.
27. Cat. 2all ff; cf. f.n. 29 infra.
28. Metaph. 1029b9: kai mikron C outhen lou ontos.
29. Though the eidos of a sensible thing is more worthy of being called ousia
than the sensible thing itself (the composite of eidos and kyle), the eidos
does not have all the marks of ousia mentioned in Book Zeta, ch. 1. It
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
is the "what-ness" (ti esti) of a thing, it is definite and, furthermore, it endures eternally. However, it is not separate (choristos) without qualification. The passage in Book Delta (1017b25) where the eidos is said to be
"separate" should probably be understood as provisional, for it is qualified
in Book Eta (1042a26) with the addition "in logos" (cf. Physics 193b4); see
W. D. Ross, Aristotle's Metaphysics Vol. I, (Oxford at the Clarendon Press,
1924) p. 311. Indeed, in the passage in Book Eta, Aristotle contrasts the
eidos which is chOristos en logoi with the composite which is chOristos haplos
(separate without qualification). The eidos of a sensible being, according
to Aristotle, is not separate or independent from the composite. Because
the composite can be said to be chon'stos haplos, it is in this respect, though
only in this respect, a better candidate for the title '&usia" than the eidos
(Metaph. 1028a24-35).
There is no contradiction in Aristotle's account of ousia. When it is
said in the Categon'es (2a10fl) that particular composites (Aristotle's examples
arc a man and a horse) are more truly ousiai than their eide, it must be
remembered that he is speaking from the standpoint of predication. The
eidos, the species "man," is predicated of a man, and this particular man
is choriston, in a way the eidos "man" is not. In the Metaphysics, on the other
hand, Aristotle is speaking from the standpoint of enduring being or
essence (to ti en einaz) and the eidos "man" endures in a way that the particular man does not. Cf Metaph. 1026a7 ff. Aristotle's account is not inconsistent. Rather, ousia itself, as it occurs in the physical realm, is found
partly in the composite, partly in the essence of the composite (i.e., the
eidos of the composite), and wholly in neither. The eidos and the composite
can each be called ousia, though for different reasons. Neither bears all
the features of ousia. But whereas composite beings are not identical with
their essences (1037b), Aristotle argues that simple beings, beings which
are not composed of form and material, arc identical with their essences.
Indeed, he says, it is for the sake of understandillg such "supersensible"
beings that the inquiry into sensible beings is undertaken (1037al4; cf
1041a8, 1076a13: Physics 192a35, 194b14). This is because such beings alone
are eternally subsisting, definite, "individual" (tode tz), indivisible, fully
actual (i.e. without hy!e) and at the saine time separate without qualification.
Each of these simple beings is wholly ousia. These ousiai are the umoved
movers of Book Lamda (cf. f.n.87 infra). The study of Being qua Being
comes to fulfillment in a philosophical theology (Metaph. 1026a20, 1064b2;
cf. 982b29-983a12).
Metaph. 1045a34. Cf 1036a10
Ibid. 1024b8.
Ibid. 1023b2.
Ibid. 1038a5.
The indeterminateness, the "un-formedness" of hyl~ (intelligible or sensiblephysical) makes it unknowable in virtue of itself' (ibid. 1036a9). The subordinate genera are more defmite, hence more knowable, than the superordinate, and the indivisible eidos is most defmite and most knowable of all.
The intelligible material within it (its superordinate universal or genus)
is completely determined by the specific difference. Aristotle develops his
notion of hyle, sensible-physical and intelligible, to account for indeterminateness and plurality both on the aesthetic plane and on the noetic.
Sensible lryle "individuates" composite ousiai and is responsible for what
is accidental in them. The genus, on the other hand, as noetic hyle, is
indeterminate and, as such, permits a multiplicy of different determinations or specifications. Aristotle's lryle is the counterpart to Plato's indeterminate dyad. Cf. Phys. 192a7. On the difference between the two "triads"
alluded to in this passage (Aristotle's: hyle and eidos/stercsis, Plato's great/small
and One) cf. H. Apostol, Aristotle's Physics (Indiana Univ. Press), p. 202,
f.n. 6 and f.n. 7. See also the works by Klein and Williamson cited in
footnote 5 supra. For the most penetrating study of how eidos, for Aristotle, is implicated in steresis (privation or, better, deprivation) in the realm
of plrysics (nature), cf. Martin Heidegger, "Vom Wesen und Begriff der
Physis~ Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klosterman, 1967), originally
published in Il Pensiero (Milan, III, 1958), pp. 364 ff. The "triad" of kyle
and eidoslsteresis constitutes the aesthetic-physical realm but not the noetic,
since sterl:sz's as it is defined in the Metaphysics (1022b22-1023a7) cannot
come into play among ousiai which are eternal (the eide of sensible composites or the simple supersensible ousiai of Book Lamda; cf. f.n. 29 supra).
One eidos can indeed be said to be "lacking'' in what another eidos has
(1023b3, Parts of Animals 642b21 ff.), but this is a derived sense of sterCSis
(Metaph. 1022b32). There is no place among what is eternal for what Aristotle calls the "'kath' auto me on" (Phys. 10lb5, cf 192a4) of steresis which is
involved in the coming to presence (parousia) of something in time (Metaph.
49
�1013bl2-16, 1032b3, 1055a35-b30, Phys. 191a5-15, 193b20, 195a10).
Metaph. 1003a6-17; cf, 1060b20.
Ibid. 1042a28; cf. l017b25 and f.n. 28 supra, also de Gen. et Cor. 318b33.
Metaph. 1087a8-25.
Ibid. 983a26, 988a35, 993al9, 1007a21, 1017b22. The thematic consideration of essence begins in Book Zeta, ch. 4.
39. Aristotle (unlike St. Thomas) makes no distinction between Being and
essence. The expression to einai with the dative of possession is an abbreviation for to ti en einai (Metaph. 1029bl ff. ). For the grammar and meaning
of this expression, see Owens, op. cit. pp. 180-188. The eidos of a composite being is its essence, but the two terms are not synonymous. Aristotle
speaks of the unmoved mover as essence (Meiaph. 1074a35) but never as
eidos, perhaps because he does not want his account to be confused with
that of the Platonists (sec Eugene Ryan, -"Pure Form in Aristotle," Phronesis,
Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1973, pp. 209-224). Nonetheless, there arc several
passages where Aristotle uses eidos in ways that indicate he may not be
thinking of it as the eidos of a composite thing: Phys. 192a35, de An. 432a2,
Metaph. 1003b22.
40. Metaph., Book Theta; see especially ch. 8.
41. Certain later thinkers make a distinction between sensation and perception, the former regarded as mere reception of sense data, the latter alone
involving discrimination. Aristotle would not accept this distinction for
at least two reasons: 1) the soul docs not receive unformed sense data but
rather sensible eide (De Anima 424a18, b4; cf. 432a3-6), and 2) aistlmis
is always engaged in discrimination (ibid. , 428a4; cf. Post. An. 99b35 where
aisthesis is called an "innate critical capacity" of all animals).
42. de An. 416b33.
43. Ibid. 417a7.
44. Ibid. 413b5, 414b4.
45. Metaph. 980a23, de Sen. 437a6, de An. 429a4, Problems 8866b35.
46. de Sen. 437all, cf. De Interpretatione 16a4.
47. de Sen. 437a7.
48. de An. 418a24. Aristotle also mentions here what in a phosphorescent body
is similar to color.
49. Ibid. 418a30; cf. de Sen. 439a35.
50. de An. 418b19.
51. de An. 417a8. There arc also several passages where Aristotle questions
whether or not the perceptible qualities themselves exist apart from the
perception of them. At de An. 426a20-27, we are told that they have potential but not actual existence when they are not being perceived. (Sec,
however, Cat. 7b35 ff, where this distinction is not advanced). Aristotle
is perhaps speaking only of proper sensibles, such as color, and not common sensibles also (figure, size, motion, number, and unity). But atMetaph.
1036a7 and 1040a3, the independent existence of all sensible objects is
called into question. In the Physics, Aristotle says that number cannot exist apart from the soul (223a22), and that the same might be said of time
(223a25) which is defined as the "number of motion with respect to the
prior and posterior." He also questions whether motion itself can exist apart
from the soul (223a27). There is a subtle difference between the doubts
that Aristotle raises in thes~ passages and those that emerge for Descartes
and his heirs (cf. f.n. 78 infra). Aristotle is not calling into question the
independent existence of an external world deprived of "looks" (eide) but
rather the independent· existence of a world he understands to be constituted through and through by ''looks:'
To my knowledge, Martin Heidegger was the first modem thinker to
insist on the root sense of '/:idos" as "looks" (Ger. '(/as Ausschen"), Sein und
Zeit, 1927, eleventh edition, (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), p. 61.) For
his detailed treatment of Aristotle's understanding of 'hdos" as "looks" and
"'hyle" as "material" (Ger. "Strifffur") vs. "matter," see "Vom Wesen und Begriff
der Plrysics:' Wegmarken (op. cit.) pp. 343 II
52. de Sen. 439a20-bl9, Aristotle realizes that this account goes against the
sense ofthe word "transparent" (diaphanes); accordingly, he refers to this
"common nature or potency" as ''ho legomen diaphanes."
53. Ibid. 439b12.
54. cf. Plato: Meno 76a.
55. de Sen. 439a24.
56. de An. 423b26; cf. de Gen. et Cor. 329b6 ff.
57. de Gen. et Cor. 329a25 (note use of choriston here; cf. f.n. 29 supra). Material
deprived of eidos would be deprived of actuality (energeia), i.e., would not
actually exist. For this reason, "material" is a better translation for "lryle"
than "matter."
58. de An. 424al9; cf. de Gen. el Cor. 332a27.
59. de An. 423b23.
60. Ibid. 423b7.
35.
36.
37.
38.
50
Ibid. 419a16-22.
Ibid. 428a11.
de Mem. 450all.
de An. 417b25.
de Mem. 45la8. On recognizing images as images cf. Jacob Klein, Commentary on Plato's Meno (op. cit.) pp. 112-115, also Hans Jonas "Image Making and the Freedom of Man" in The Phenomenon of Life (New York, 1966)
pp. 159-165.
66. de Mem. 450a26.
67. Ibid. 450b10.
68. Ibid. 450a30-32.
69. It is sometimes asserted that we can only remember images since the mind
can only consider what is present to it. To the extent that this claim is
not a mere begging of the question ("the present alone can be an object
of'intending' because the mind can only focus on the present"), it is based on an ambiguity in the word "present." One can maintain with Aristotle, however, that the past can indeed become present to the soul, i.e.,
can be the focus of the "mental" act of remembering, without thereby
becoming temporally present in its full concreteness. Indeed, if we could
only focus our thought on the temporal present it is hard to see how we
could ever arrive at a conception of the past or future, or time itself, or,
for that matter, the temporal present. Aristotle realizes that we actually
remember the past and we do so by viewing images of the past as images
of the past. To have an image of the past or a memory is to remember
the past itself. And in remembering the past itslf we recognize that our
present images, which only assist in remembering the past, are incomplete
pictures of the past we are remembering. We are capable of remembering (past) images or memories, but rarely do so, preferring to remember
past "realities" instead.
70. de An. 429b11-24. Cf. f.n. 39 supra.
71. At the end of the Post An. (995b15 ff.), Aristotle addresses the question
of how the universal emerges from particulars, the one from the many.
We are given only a simile (though a remarkable one-100a12) for how
this happens. Aristotle argues, by process of elimination, that it must be
nous which knows the archai (100b12; cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1140b31-1141a8),
and that the ascent to this knowing is by_ way of induction (epagoge 100b4).
The discussion does not show how the particulars are so constituted that
the universal can be recognized in them, nor does it tell us why the insight of which nous is capable is precise (akpibes, 100b8) and true (alethes,
100b12). This account must be supplemented by what Aristotle says in
other places, esp. in the De Anima and Metaplrysics.
72. de An. 431b2.
73. Ibid. 431b17.
74. Aristotle uses lmptesthai and haphe for touching and touch as a type of aesth'
esis. Thigein is never used this way but rather as mere bodily contact or
as the direct encounter of nous with noeta (Metaph. 1051b20, 1072b22). See
H. Bonitz, Index Aristotelieus, p. 331, for citation of passages where the term
occurs.
75. Odyss9' VIII, 170. (Translation by Richmond Lattimore.)
76. Ibid., XI .367 cf. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford at the
Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 1147.
77. See Owens op. cit. pp. 382-385.
78. When nature becomes mathematized in the 17th Century, eidos and morphe
are, in effect, reduced to schema or figure, which is itself a mere transient
feature of"cxtension." And since the comparatively clear and distinct notion of extension has no intrinsic connection with the self-presentation
of beings, our encounter with the world must be explained by considering the nature of the "subject" instead of the "object." The world deprived
.of eidos is no longer on display but shut up in itself, cxtemal, its very existence a philosophical problem. The subject is similarly shut up in himself,
an "ego" rather than the soul of a living body. This subject relates to the
world only through "ideas," which ideas are not, as they were for Plato,
the eide themselves, but part of the inventory of that closed domain of interiority that is the mind, "representing:' somehow, the world outside.
For those who maintain that the mind can only be aware of its own
inventmy, its ideas, there is the special problem of how it could recognize
the idea it has of an external world as the idea of an external world, or,
for that matter, how it could form the idea of an internal world as opposed to an external world, i.e., how it could fonn the idea of an internal
world at all. The thesis that the mind has awareness only of its own inner
content would, if true, be a thesis that could not occur to the mind.
79. Parts of Anifflals 644a21-645a36.
80. Republic 533. Alan Bloom's translation of "horborin: barharikoi. The Republic
of Plato (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968), p. 212.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
WINTER 1984
�81. Metaph. 992b9.
82. f.n. 29 supra. Though the individual cannot be defined, its essence can
be. Metaph. 998b5, 1012a22, 1042a17; cf. Post An. 9620 ff. On the unity
of the definition, sec Metaph. 1037b11 ff (cf. 1041b11), 1043b24-1044a5,
1045a9-33).
83. Metaph. 1005b19, Another version is found at Post. An. 77a10. ''It is impossible to assent and deny simultaneously [one thing of another]." This
''logical" version derives its force from the "ontological" version in the
Metapfrysics. Taken by itself it is not even true, insofar as one can, as matter of fact, utter a frank contradiction. One cannot, of course, do so trutlifulry, for truthful utterance accords with Being. (cf. 1011b15-21 and 1051a35
ff.) That is why Aristotle argues that the axioms are the concern of First
Philosophy (Metaph. 1005a19-b18).
84. Metaph. 1006a2 ff.
85. de An. 430a15.
86. de An. 430a22; cf. Post. An. 99b27.
87. Metaph. 1074b28. How the unmoved mover ofthc sphere of the fixed stars
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
differs from the other forty-six or so unmoved movers that Aristotle has
to posit to account for the plurality of heavenly spheres (1074al5) is left
unanswered. They must be plural in number, and yet they arc not individuated by lryle. Perhaps they are to be thought of as distinct individual
essences (like St. Thomas' angels). But, then, does each engage in noesis?
in noesis noeseos? If so, it seems that they would all be gods, for they would
all have the same intrinsic activity (energeia) as the unmoved mover of the
outermost sphere. Yet how would they be individuated if neither by kyle
nor by energeia? There is a serious difficulty in reconciling Aristotle's ·
cosmology with his "ontology:'
Metaph. 1072b14; cf. 1003b17.
Ibid. 1075a4.
Ibid. 1028b4.
Cf. Metaph. 982b29-983a12, 1072b22-30, N.E. 1177a13-18,
1177b26-1178a8, 1141a21.
Parts of Animals 644a33.
Chameleons
My young life ended in a derelict house,
Overrun by chameleons.
I have squandered it among these;
In the rapt study of a grass-green one
Sunning on a white porch rail, throat bloated;
Watching a brown one skinking
Through interstices of sunlight
In the grey shade of ivy;
In the solitude of a sly one climbing
The amber sides of a whiskey glass;
And in the silence of a grey one
Become a branch, more than disguised,
Still, still as August air.
This all ended by the blunt intrusion of another.
And they were gone. I have not seen them again.
Exotic here, but local to my childhood.
JoHN FoNTAINE
An alumnus of St. John's, Annapolis, Mr. Fontaine is living and writing in the
Southeastern United States.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
51
�OccASIONAL DiscouRsEs
Winter 1984
Intellect and Intuition
Eva Brann
For the California Alumni
I
Y
ou .asked me to speak about "Intellect and
Intuition;' an enormous topic and yet an
intimate one- enormous because the title
encompasses the two most distinctively
human activities, and intimate because I
have, after all, no way to come to terms with it but to
look into myself. But it is a congenial inquiry you've
chosen and a congenial setting you've provided, because
I can speak my thoughts to you pretty nearly as I do to
myself. In fact most of what I will say now I thought to
myselflast summer wandering up and down among the
pinyons of Monte Sol.
As I tried to concentrate on the matter, one obtrusive
difficulty proved to be the very advantage we have in
common -an acquaintance with the texts which most enticingly shape the terms in question. My effort to think
would be again and again deflected by remembered formulations, resulting in a kind of short-circuiting of the
tension of perplexity. That tendency to be, off and on,
sucked into trusted formulations happens to be my
Charybdis of reflection. The opposing Scylla of brooding
consumes her victim with the need to revise and to
reconstrue things from sheer honest contrariness. I must
say that I am always fascinated by the fact that the world
submits to the latter treatment, which indeed seems to
yield very original notions; I guess this mode too catches
hold of an aspect of things.
I have tried, then, really to find out what I think
rather than to remember what has been thought.
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. Her essay, "Against
Time," appeared in the Summer 1983 issue of the Review.
52
Nonetheless the outcome, as you will recognize, is often
what a much-loved dean of our college used to call in
Russian English "discovering America;' namely coming
wide-eyed upon well-known worlds. In my case it means
arriving, after much casting about, at places opened to
us all as long as two-and-a-half millenia ago. Such forays
bring back no new product and cannot be made in behalf
of anyone else. But I think what holds us all together is
just this-that we think well of each other for undertaking these voyages and want to see each others' logs.
II
Well, to the beginning, which is to ask myself how
the title is meant. Is it intended to imply that intellect
and intuition are antagonists, that is, "intellect vs. intuition"? After all, if I come across one of those trite double headings like "The Individual and Society'' I know
perfectly well that the writer will not be celebrating a
harmonious fit. On the other hand, the two terms might
be meant to be joined on the same side; you will recall
that Kant directs his critique against a so-called "intellectual intuition;' by which he means a vision of thought.
He claims that there cannot be such a faculty because
thinking cannot confront or encompass thought itself;
it can only form and function over sense material. The
requirement behind this denial is that the relation of
thinking to its object must be firmly certified, and if
thinking the truth is beholding independent thoughtobjects; such certification becomes, Kant thinks,
unintelligible.
At this moment I have to observe that there seem to
be two kinds of starting points for any inquiry. Sometimes
I am oppressed by some vague unease- indeed it would
be more accurate to call it an uneasy vagueness- which
WINTER 1984
�eventually draws me to that first and most mystifying step
of cogitation: the coagulation of a question. But
neither was the interior image of the bare enunciation,
the two smaller squares constructed on the short sides
sometimes, as in our case, a problem about terms is put
of the right triangle and the large square on the
to me, and then I find myself, by a pretty firm intellectual habit, first of all collecting and inspecting in order
their corrupt, their trite, and their unfaded uses. (Incidentally, I feel entitled to use such a method for rightly directing the mind only because I try to remember how easily
it can turn into a routine for avoiding thought.)
hypotenuse, the revealing geometric intuition of the
theorem, for the imagination is scandalously unable to
I'll begin with intuition, because it is the word more
squashing half of each small square into a triangle and
pivoting that triangle into half of the adjoining parts of
the large square. When you saw that, you knew the truth
immediately and for good and without words- if I called
on you right now you could, no doubt, sketch it out. It
was that dynamically immobile image which was the intuitive object. The proof accomplished another purpose.
4. As a ground for all spatial and temporal imagining, Kant introduced a receptive faculty which he called
widely and commonly used. And right away I notice that
it sometimes means an activity and sometimes the ob-
ject of that activity- either the power or its product. Here
are i the uses I can distinguish.
1. We say of people- though I try not to- that they
and intuitive, and people say it to themselves. They apparently mean that they apprehend things directly
without belaboring them by analysis or even without accosting them with too close an inspection. There do seem
to be people who, from minimal observation and no articulable reflection, see what's up. I must say that in my
experience this gift is often accompanied by a royal obtuseness to those aspects of the world which are not immediately apprehensible, and that more often than not
"being intuitive" means just a will-less (of even willful)
habit of sticking with those feelings that accompanied
first impressions. Intuitive people often accuse their supposed opposites of "being so analytical;' and of course,
they have a point: there are people who pry things apart
with deft inaccuracy.
The object of intuition in this sense is often said to
be the ineffable, and it seems to be apprehended
preferably in fugue states.
2. Sometimes, again, what is meant is something
more delicate in the same line, what Pascal calls the esprit
de finesse and opposes to the mathematical mind. It is a
disposition to learn from a multitude of immediate
sources rather than to reason from a few remote
principles -what we might call quick sensitivity.
3. But mathematics itself also has an intuitive mode,
namely the ability to "see" mathematical objects and to
form conjectures of mathematical truths way ahead of
their deduction. I have heard that there are certain
mathematicians who are famous for their theorems and
notorious for their proofs. The object of mathematical
discern the equality of differently shaped areas or to sum
them. To see that the two smaller squares together are
equal to the larger one it was necessary to see Euclid's
construction at work: to view it as a kind of engine for
the intuition; a capacity for both receiving and forming
sensory material into ordered spatial and temporal structures. Hence for Kant all experience of the world is in
one aspect intuition. The pure objects of this faculty,
namely space and time themselves, he also called intuitions. I mention this use only because here the term
designates so stupendously original and influential a
concept.
5. The final meaning I can think of, most remote from
ordinary use and yet, I would guess, the spring of my
whole inquiry, is that very one intended by the phrase
I mentioned before, "intellectual intuition." The Greeks
had a single word for the capacity, noesis: they called the
corresponding object noetOn, meaning that which is for
the intuitive intellect.
But before describing- broadly-what it seems to me
the two Greeks whose works we have all read both meant
by nOesis, let me dispose of a more recent derivative use.
I say "dispose of'' because try as I will I cannot grasp it
in my thinking. Descartes in particular speaks of intuiting
propositions; people in general speak of intuitive concepts. They mean those elements and connections of
thinking which are clear and distinct to them. "Clear and
distinct" is a phase which seems to me primarily ap-
plicable to things seen, and might be used analogously
of some vision-like apprehension, but I have never held
and cannot think that I ever could hold in mind a pro-
intuition is particularly familiar to us in its imaginative
position which was so well illuminated and so incisively
geometric form, of which more in a moment. (Oddly
enough for the mathematical school specifically called
contoured as to be called intuitive. It is not only that I
"intuitionist;' the term intuition means just the opposite:
It is adopted from Kant and refers to the constructive
rules of temporal finite thinking.)
These objects of the geometric imagination are, I
would guess, those intuitions all of us here most ar-
ticulably share. For an example, let me quickly remind
you of that high-point of your freshman mathematics
tutorial, the penultimate proposition of Euclid's first book,
the Pythagorean theorem. The picture itself, as you prob-
have never met with a proposition that stayed evident
for more than a moment-Descartes' examples, such as
"I exist;' turn into enigmatic murk under the lightest
probing- but that propositional thinking seems to me
ipso facto incapable of immediate apprehension.
The ancient notion of nOesis arises from the sense that
appearances mask, or alternatively communicate, what
it is they are. While we can reach for this "whatness" and
circumscribe it with thinking we can also know it directly.
As I mentioned, it is such direct taking in of what things
tion: It was far too determinate in its blackboard place
are which is called noesis; what is thus intuitable is called
eidos, signifying that which is for the sight of the soul,
and far too inexact in its broomstick boundaries. But
that is to say, intuition.
ably brought out in your discussions, was not the intui-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
53
�In trying to make something of all these usages I must
remind myself that none ofthe several ways to go about
that business is innocuous and free of a heavy freight
of pre-judgements. For example, I can restrict myself to
following out a concatenation or a family of uses, refraining strictly from the supposition of a possible common
meaning; or I can analyze how expressions containing
the term are formed, attending to pre-set logical criteria
rather than to the speaker's intention; or I can look for
a common factor, positing that as the central meaning;
or I can rank the uses, attempting to reveal a primary
significance of which the others are analogies.
Now in the case of the term intuition, there is a common feature that jumps out, namely that of directness
and immediacy. Intuiting· is not laboriously temporal;
an intuition is effortlessly and instantaneously all there.
That is not to say that it may not take effortful time to
come up to the point of intuition or that I cannot dwell
on it and range over it and even play with it. But these
are preparations and reactions. The intuiting proper and
the intuition itself just take place.
III
But immediacy is only a relation, and a negative one
at that, namely the relation of coming before us without
anything intervening. Perhaps to get somewhat nearer
to intuition itself- and I now find myself supposing that
I do have that sort of apprehension- it would be best
to begin at the other end, to turn to the way of intervening steps and mediating words, which is usually called
discursive thinking, or just thinking. Reasonings, particularly proofs, are regarded as examples par excellence of this
mode.
Now just because it seems to me so unlikely and so
contrary to my experience that thinking should really be
preeminently reasoning, I want to begin by inspecting
the notion of proof-and why not use as example the one
that accompanies the Pythagorean theorem? I say "accompanies" for I have argued that the geometric truth
is in the picture.
The first thing about this or any proof is that it is
in words. I am indeed discovering America when it comes
to me that, above all, reasoning speaks. Now the proof
seems to speak out of both sides of the mouth. On one
side it only prompts me to look at the picture in a certain way. Here its words function to focus me on the
geometric situation, particularly to see the dispositions
of the construction we all know so well. On the other
side, the proof is not concerned with its matter as a
theorem to be seen but as a proposition to be positioned
in a system. In this aspect the proof is really a sequence
of validations which, in ensuring that the proposition has
legitimate antecedents, incidentally also shows what its
place in the system is.
It seems to me that in reflecting on this proof, I come
upon a curious discrepancy. On the one hand, the reasoning is about the picture, but in such a way that the "why
and the "that;' which are one and the same in intuition,
are now separated and strung out in a sequence. On the
54
other hand, this reasoned sequence is driven from enunciation to conclusion by a necessity quite apart from what
it is about. If all the words of the proof which direct me
to the picture were deprived of this reference- that is
to say, if they became mere symbols- the proof would
remain a structure of reason, although it would be about
nothing. In other words, it is possible for orderly thinking, which is about something, to turn itself into mere
reasoning, mere rationality. Such thinking is the last thing
I come to in life, and that is why I got it out of the way
first.
IV
There is then a primary thinking, it seems to me,
which begins long before it is time for reasoning and
proving. Searching, inquiring thinking is not like the
linear stepwise progression of proof. (I am somewhat
reluctant to say that, because so many people who despise
"linear thinking" appear to want to know nothing of the
effort needed for any other kind.) Thinking, once done,
can always be presented in reasoned form- though rarely
is its significance in the concluding line.
In fact, I now remember a very famous case in point
-the basic Aristotelian syllogism: All men are mortal;
Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. As a way
to discovering the conclusion it is an absurdity. Whatever
effort there is goes into establishing the premise that "All
men are mortal;' and to do that I must surely already
know that we will all die, including Socrates- as indeed
he did, with great flair. Now Aristotle himself never meant
the syllogism to be taken as a deductive proof form, but
rather as a record of an illumination, the discovery of
the reason why we must die, namely as a consequence
of our human essence, because we are human beings,
because of the middle term, man. To know that is surely
to know something.
v
Working with and against these preceding examples
of thinking in extremis, so to speak, I want to make an
inventory of traits shown by living, inquiring, provisional
thought as I know it. I don't, by the way, suppose that
everyone does as I do- I do mean that they do what I
do, that we are about the same business even if the occasions of our perplexity, the tempo of our grappling and
the idiom of our articulations are very different. The
cavalier claim that "every one thinks differently" seems
to me based on willful inexperience. (And yet- I have
sometimes wondered whether some, a very few people,
might not have genuinely different thinking experiences.)
I will number my first observation, as mathematicians so nicely do, with the number zero.
0. Thinking is unmistakably done by me in a body,
but in a body set aside in the sense that it requires to
be at ease in a balmy or buoyant environment (Descartes
had an oven-heated room and I, to compare small with
great, have a hot bath), or independently occupied by
WINTER 1984
�rhythmic motion in monotonously beautiful surroundings, among sights pleasant to gaze at without real
looking. But there is also a stranger and somewhat
humiliating connection: Physical stimulants affect, or better, release thinking, and a cup of coffee can cause a
revelation.
1. My guess is that it is because of its bodily basis
that my thinking has a motoric and mechanical mode.
It can labor in low gear, lug in high gear, stall and idle-all
familiar thought-experiences. Of these, that thinking
which runs in neutral is the most disturbing but also illuminating phenomenon -when my mind babbles on by
itself, disengaged. It shows that real thinking requires
-a moment-to-moment effort to hold it to its matter, a
continual spontaneity. Accordingly, no truly-thought
thought seems to follow as a necessary effect from a
previous thought; each comes from a fresh effort to
understand. I do not mean to say that thoughts may not
have necessary connection- only that I myself must think
it. Indeed it now seems to me that thinking is largely
the effort to break out of motoric mentation.
And I also notice that as every instant thinking begins
anew, so it ends with a kind of click, and "aha'' of having
settled the matter (or alternatively, a pause of perplexity). Thinking appears to be in its step-wise way as discontinuous as intuition which is suddenly there and suddenly gone. So in that respect, at least, there is ultimately
no difference between them. I may go back and interpose ever more steps into my thought progress; I can include between any two steps the rules for inferring the
next step; in short I can make the argument as dense
as possible; it will still be discrete. And as the parts, so
the whole: the thought sequence ends with a mental click,
the sound of the proper seating of the thought, the mark
of a satisfaction which is like an assent, whose absence
arouses a fidgety agony of new trials. (This experience
of thinking incidentally seems to me to account for the
peculiar form of a Socratic conversation, in which
Socrates proposes thoughts while his interlocutor gets to
say only "Yes;' "How not?" "But Socrates .. :' It is the
internal activity of thinking distributed over two people.)
Another observation: Those people who advocate questioning for its own sake seem to regard thinking as a kind
of continuum, like a mood, which flows on until it fades
or is broken, while it seems to me that thinking is in its
very nature positive. As it is a series of small settlements,
so in the aggregate it aims to reach a position and rest.
2. Since thinking is continually effortful, and continually monitored, it must have something to do with
my willing and wanting-though I see that I shouldn't
confuse that inner monitor who is satisfied or uneasy with
my willing, since that monitor's business is not to force
but to follow thought. I, my willful self, ought to govern
my thought only insofar as I hold it to its business, and
even then my willing is rather a wanting which is more
exigent even than the desire for repose. What I want first
and last is to possess myself and my world- not in a mode
of domination but in a way of bringing out both of our
respective and related contours. When I leave an experience or a problem unthought-through there is an un-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
supportable sense that a fuzzy accretion is interposing
itself between me and my existence, that I am going to
be enveloped in dumb immediacy and my life will be
an unappropriated mess. I think that must be the sense
Socrates is expressing when he says that the unexamined
life is not to be lived ~'not to be lived" is what he literally says. I never could understand Wordsworth's "We
murder to dissect" complaint: The analysis of a thing or
an event, far from destroying its integrity, first gives it
not merely clarity but the possibility of presence itself;
We dissect to maintain life. That, it seems to me, is what
thinking does: It makes me try to get hold of things, so
that they are there for me. Of course, there is a kind of
analysis which with deadly inaccuracy pries things apart
in unnatural places and which forces affairs, particularly
human affairs, into crude and demeaning patterns; it does
indeed murder its matter. But that is not thinking. It is
functioning with theory-patterns, and it shows that not
only will but also willfulness can move thought. Truth
to tell, I know it as an all too familiar temptation- the
willful forcing of thought according to a pre-conceived
intention.
3. Thinking is speech, quite literally interior speaking, voiceless English utterance. That observed fact makes
me doubt the notion that speech is primarily or originally
a kind of social interaction. How can I think so when
I observe that ninety-nine out of a hundred words that
I speak every day are not meant to be heard, because
I speak to myself (from whom I can want nothing and
can hide nothing and with whom I don't much want to
play speech-solitaire) the same language as I talk with
my fellow humans with whom I am supposed to be playing language games or committing speech-acts? I am
surely glad that I can use language for communication,
that is, for alluding to something we humans have in common, but my sense is that my speech (once I have come
into it) can be used to communicate because I use it to
speak to myself, not the other way around.
Here is the old mystery on which I can scarcely get
a handle: There is admittedly thoughtless speech. Is there
perhaps also speechless thought? No matter how hard
I try, I cannot get hold of a thought without a word. There
may well be speechless apprehensions and they may well
be those very intuitions I am trying to distinguish. But
that time-taking effort I think of as thinking- can it be
anything distinguishable from the speech in which I do
it? Of course it cannot be speech in the merely linguistic
sense, since I could use another language like German,
and sometimes do. It must be (and here once again I
am discovering America) speech in the sense the Greeks
termed logos, which might be rendered by "thinkingspeech:' Logos has meaning, something more intimate
than significance, which latter is the relation of a sign
to its object. Thinking-speech is literally utterance, that
is "outerance;' the silently audible embodiment (which
my bodily being seems to require) of my inner activitynot its sign, but its expression.
It is just because speech has meaning in this sense,
because it is the external appearance of thinking, thatunless I am feeling mighty bloody-minded- I do not ask
55
�whether another speaker's statements mean anything or
not according to some pre-determined criterion of meaningfulness. Rather I ask first whether the speaker means
anything, that is, whether his words are expressions of
a thinking effort, and next what he means, that is, how
I can express his thinking as my own, and finally whether
I can give assent.
By saying that speech has meaning and is an expression of thinking I have tried to convey a strange apprehension, namely that it is nothing but uttered thinking; speech
does not "signify" thinking or thoughts or stand for them,
but it means them.
Now thinking and its words are of several sorts, it
seems. One sort of word intends something- I think and
speak of things. For example, the pronoun "I" has come
far too often into this speech. (I cannot tell, incidently,
why it is called a pro-noun since surely the name Eva
stands for it, and not the other way around). When I
say "I;' I am sure I intend something- though I should
probably not say "some thing:' What I do intend, it would
take a whole new talk to try to come near, but in any
case, it is that which feels my feelings, "has" my memories
and "does" my thinking. Or again, when -I say "Monte
Sol;' I intend a feature of the land, a mountain that,
although not clearly separate in stufffrom its surroundings, derives its intendabiliy from rising like a dark green
sun behind the campus in Santa Fe. Or ''pinyon;' which,
unlike the name "Monte Sol;' I can say of numerous appearances and in several ways at once- a capability expressed in the term, '1ogos" itself which has behind it the
sense of "gathering." (Now that I come to think of it, in
this gathering lies the power of the word over the world
of appearances- but then again, did the appearances not
allow themselves to be so gathered, thinking-speech would
come to nothing.) Accordingly, I can intend by the word
pinyon any one or all of a species of the genus pine, or
that kind of tree itself, or a sort of rooted censer from
which to pinch aromatic needles, or a rather ragged bush
which, when the rain paints its trunk black, suddenly
stands forth visibily as a tree. Words of a certain sort,
then, namely those called nouns, intend or reach for
objects.
I also observe that these intended things incite and
inhibit my thinking in revealing ways. For instance if I
try to think pinyon, I am almost irresistibly drawn on
to thinking tree, although the reverse is not as inevitable,
and that m'akes me say that pinyon "comes under" tree.
And although it seems to me as self-evident as anything
that whatever thought I can get hold of in speech at all
is a thought I can think, the things I think about do
evidently have the power to make some thoughts nearly
impossible: for instance a pinyon resists being thought
of as both being and not being such. If I think these
thoughts anyway, I have a lot of explaining to do to
myself, mostly concerned with the meaning of that word
"being."
But there are also words which intend no thing. Some
of these mean the directing gestures that thinking seems
to develop within itself as it runs, hesitates, jolts on,
doubles back. For example there is "but;' a hand held
56
up by thinking to itself to admit an opposing train of
thought; and there is "although;' which requires thinking to run on two tracks at once; and there is "therefore;'
which means home-free. In communicating-speech I use
th~se words to coax another's thinking into becoming like
mine.
The last use of speech is not so interesting as an accomplishment as it is fascinating as a possibility. I can
willfully disregard or abstract from any definite intention a word might have, and I have been taught to do
that by turning the words into symbols, say the letters
A and B. I can also overlook that most intimate striving
of thoughtful propositions to be about something (as
Euclid's forty-seventh is about right triangles), and I show
that further abstraction by using symbols like p and q.
Now I often put my propositions into a kind of wordharness, and above all the one called "if ... then:' I can
do that because the propositions are about things or
events, and these appear to have inner connection- call
them causal. So if it rains, then the ground will grow
red, the pinyons will show their shape and the air will
become aromatic. Now forget about that real connection of things which my thinking grasps and simply define
such a relation; call it implication and let its symbol be
a horseshoe on its side. By going on like this, one can
establish a kind of ghost-speech, a denatured logos which
is (oddly, it seems, to me) called symbolic logic. What
is fascinating is the way it is done- by glancing surreptitiously at living thinking and then deliberately formulating its ways as mock-arbitrary rules (equally oddly
called "axioms," a word which, as you know, originally
meant "notions deserving assent"). In my experience
logical thinking is both more difficult and less demanding than searching thinking and for one and the same
reason: because it is about nothing.
But it now comes to me that I have been carried too
far in my sense that the motions of thinking-speech, its
releases and restraints, are all derived from the way things
are, so that speech has no necessity of its own- for that
amounts to saying that there is no logic at all. Speech
does have a capability, and even one intention, which is
all its own: It can negate and it can literally intend
"nothing." Nowhere in the world or beyond it does negation show or is nothing present, and yet my thinking has
no definition at all unless I can say "no;' "not;' "none;'
"nothing:' I see that with this afterthought I have started
a topic too deep for present pursuit. It probably is the
topic of logic proper, of logos-logic.
4. And finally and above all, thinking is "about"
something. "Discursive thought'~that phrase literally
means thought that runs hither and thither, going about
its business. I can get hold of this best in a figure. When
I think about something I begin by focussing, by getting hold-I know not how-of an intending or reaching
word, which is why my first notes are usually just a list
of nouns. That intending, I see, reaches for the thing itself,
for this particular fragrant pinyon which grows on the
mountain, and also, strangely, for the one odorless but
definite species of the genus pine in which all pinyons
are gathered. But what the word reaches for is not what
WINTER 1984
�it gets. What I grasp in thinking-speech is not a full, present object in or out of the sensible world, but my own
impenetrably peripheral hold itself; I hold captive a mere
circumference. That I try to grasp firmly with one hand
of my mind (which is called conceiving) while with the
other I try to make out its compass, its contours, its
cracks, and its connections (which is called trying to
understand). That is why upon thinking my speech usually comes in sentences: subject-predicate- this is such.
But here is the point. The discoveries I make in the
course of these explorations are often satisfying and even
illuminating, yet they are not what I am really after, not
the true end of the effort, just because this thinking is
always thinking round about something. What I long for
in thinking is that I should not forever remain on the
surface and in the fissures of this or that matter, but
should penetrate within it and find the inner aspects and
coimections of that which has attracted and withstood
my thinking. Such penetration should, I suppose, be
called insight, and what I might find there is, I guess,
what philosophers call "being;' a word which stands, for
me at least, more for an. incitement than for an
expenence.
I appear, once again, to have discovered America.
It seems to be my favorite activity, in life and in thought.
VI
Now, after a brief review of the five traits of thinking which I have come upon, the moment will have arrived to formulate just how thinking is un-immediate.
That is, after all, what I wanted to find out, so that I
could tell better what intuition might be; for whatever
it may be, at least it seems always to be described as an
immediate mode of apprehension.
To the review then: 0. Thinking is closely connected
to the body and has a mechanical, even a motoric mode.
1. However, when it is a genuine effort ~t does not run
continuously but comes in ever-spontaneous starts and
settlements which are received or rejected by an inner
monitor, myself but not my will. 2. My will, however,
or rather, my need, is the source of the effort, and the
need is that of coming into my experience, of appropriating my life. 3. That effort appears to my inner
ear in unvoiced yet sensory utterance, and therefore this
thinking-speech "means" or expresses thinking. Some of
the words of this speech "intend" or reach for objects like
things or kinds of things, others express the motions of
my thinking, and yet others express the connections between the things that my thinking apprehends. These
last can be abstracted and reestablished in disassociation
from meaning. 4. And above all, thinking is "about"
something, which implies that as the thinking effort is
drawn to embrace being, so it is kept at its circumference.
I think I now understand wherein thinking is unimmediate. It has to do with the figures that come to
mind in the effort to describe it: the figures of hearing
(though in a sense that is no figure since in thinking I
literally talk to myself) and of touching and grasping.
The heard word which expresses thinking also muffles
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
it. Except for the trivial case of onomatopoeia, it has no
similarity, no reference at all, to what it says, nor does
it "stand for" anything; if there is one thing the word is
not, it is a sign or a symbol. Perhaps vocables, minimal
modulations of sound, were fitly elected to express our
effort to capture what is: Ampler sound can affect and
move us; a cry rouses attention, a music tunes the soul,
but the subdued word, unsignificant and unassimilable,
expression and screen at once, is the fitting form for the
sheer immaterial doing which thinking amounts to.
The same holds for the grasping phase of thinking.
To be sure, something is disclosed by the discursive form
"this is such;' but what the grasp of thinking holds it also
hides. Thinking is not insight. I think I have discovered the
human condition with respect to the desire to know: It
is to be kept from our end by our means.
Before returning to intuition let me apologize for
what I might, if I talked that way, call a terminological
shift. You probably noticed that I have substituted the
word "thinking" for the assigned term, "intellect." I had
to do that because "intellect" has connotations both too
low and too high for our purpose. For on the one hand,
from it is derived the name of those whose thinking
motors along in theory-patterns, the so-called "intellectuals;' while on the other hand the term "intellection"
serves to translate nOesis, the ancient name for thought
which sees, the grandest kind of intuition.
VII
By now you have probably forgotten the five uses of
intuition which I thought I could distinguish. But no matter, for several were only derivative and a manner of
speaking about cases where something was thought to
be known right off; what was interesting was only what
all the uses had in common, namely immediacy. So let
me, keeping in mind that features of thinking I have just
delineated, propose three possible kinds of intuitive activities and their objects.
1. I seem to have a world of appearance immediately
before me. (To be sure, the organs of sense are often considered as the instruments of its perception, but they are
not media in such a way as to drive me to say that they
intervene between me and the appearances; they are
means rather than media.) But now I see that I for one
would hardly want to call the world at large an intuition
(though some authors have done just that) if the term
is to have any definition at all. Just as thinking is concentrating, so also it seems to me intuiting must be a
kind of focussing, but while thinking is about the absent, intuition is of the present.
For example, in my wanderings in downtown Santa
Fe,_ I often stopped before a painting which seemed to
me the record of a perceptive intuition in this more
restricted sense. It was the very type of a Southwestern
landscape, and the Santa Feans among you know that
the curse of that genre lies in the natural histrionics of
Southwestern weather. In this painting three cottonwoods
by an arroyo, seen against a great, vibrantly slate-gray
storm sky, were lit up golden-chartreuse by a slanting
57
�sun-burst from beyond the frame. The magic of it was
solely that of a memory-prompt: I have seen such scenes,
briefly but, I would say, intuitively. The word is no longer
much used that way, but it once meant a glance of strong
regard, and also the sight which was its object. That is,
of course, what "intuition" literally says: at-sight. (This
ugly but accurate rendition is corroborated in the German version, familiar from Kant: An-schauung.) ''Atsight" is directed toward what is more than a mere halfapprehended surrounding, toward what is not only bifore
me, but for me, the significant presence beheld in active
seeing. I don't doubt that some people have a gift for such
quick salient sight.
2. So much the more will there be intuitions of the
imagination, at least if presence is an even deeper feature
of intuition than immediacy. For the imagination, insofar
as it is a capability for re-presenting perceptions, usually exercises its power for compacting or attenuating
them: It may concentrate the inner vision on the high
points of perceived scenes. That is why paintings and
memories so easily merge. Or again, it may abstract inessentials and rectifY irregularities so as to leave a clarified
schema of appearance. (Most thinking seems to take its
bearing from such residual perceptions.) Or finally, it
may produce its own intuitions, either rich sights never
before seen, imbued with inexpressible significance, or
the spare figures of geometry,· the intuitions most inviting
to thought. These diagram-sights are the intuitions which
words can most reliably call forth and can most satisfyingly be about.
3. And finally, there is the intuition of thought itself,
intellectual intuition. When I say "there is" I mean: there
might be, there must be, I wish there to be. Its object
is what thinking would be about: the fulfillment of its
grasp, the immediate presence of its end. It is what the
great Greeks call the noet6n, the object of thought. Of
58
course, I myself have never broken through thinking to
behold the object of thought, though thrice in a decade
for half a moment I have had the sense that but a little
was wanting. Could it be that I do see it whenever I really
perceive what appears around me? Could it be that what
appears and what I take in when I see is just what I think
about- that what I search for without and within coincides, so to speak, behind my back? It comes home to
me that it is the pursuit of those questions which is
primarily called philosophy.
VIII
Where am I then? I have discovered that thinking,
although it can hold and explore its objects, can never
penetrate them, can never have insight. And so it never
quite attains to "at-sight;' intuition, the direct beholding
of what it is about. In our best seeing and imagining we
have all experienced the felicity of such immediate
presence, but my thinking, at least, seems to be forever
about absence. My guess is that it holds for us all: Intuition is what we long for, thinking is what we can do.
What follows? An answer comes to my inner earpartly as the remembered sound of a passage that was
once read to me, partly as the recollected sense of a meaning that I then took to heart. Happily I know where to
find the text, so I can recite to you literally Socrates' passionately involved speech:
The other points I made in behalf of my argument I won't .fully
enforce. But that, in believing we need to search after whatever
one of us doesn't see, we will be better than if we believe that
what we don't know we can't discover and needn't search
after-that I will figlit for fully and to the end and for all I'm
worth, in speech and in action. (Meno 87 B-C)
Santa Fe, Summer 1983
WINTER 1984
�Beyond the First Hundred Years:
Some Remarks on the Significance of Tristan
Elliott Zuckerman
ince my name begins with the letter Z, I'm used
to being last. When I see myself listed at the
end of a series of lectures on a serious subject,
I imagine that I've been asked to provide the
analog of a satyr-play, as exordium to the drama
of the day. Today the drama has been particularly rich,
and the length has been such as to be thought sustainable
by only the most devoted of Wagnerians. I should, perhaps, have planned to end the day with some imitation
of a Verkliirung. But my powers are, to say the least, slimmer than those with which Wagner enabled Isolde to settle into her redemptive B major. Instead, what I have
in mind is a more modest Transfiguration. And for this
the analog of the satyr-play has some point. For although
I do not intend to be frivolous or parodistic, I do intend
to take us back to Ancient Greece.
A return to the ancient must seem especially misdirected, given the title of my talk. Beyond the First Hundred Years surely denotes the two decades and a half since
1959, or at least the eighteen years since the centennial
of the first performance. The present, not the past, was
to be my territory. But when I was asked to give this talk
I knew I wouldn't be able to do what was required of
me. At best, I could go Beyond a century of Tristan not
in the chronological sense but in another way, more theoretical, that is perhaps better suggested by the German
cognate jenseits.
There was a good reason for expecting me to bring
the history of the reception of Tristan up to date. Twenty
years ago I published a book that is now out of print but
still listed in bibliographies. The first two chapters dealt
S
Mr. Zuckerman gave this talk to the Wagner Society of New York on December
3, 1983. He was the last of six speakers, and the day also included a panel
discussion with the principal singers of the current Metropolitan Opera production of Tristan.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
with the inception and composition of Tristan, and with
the events that led up to the remarkable first performance
and its reverberations. But after that I chronicled almost
a century of the response to the work- an account that
was by no means complete, but selected. The criteria for
the selection had been set out for me by the man who
was in the course of his life Wagner's greatest enthusiast
and his profoundest critic. Indeed, before the chronicle
could get going, there had to be a chapter about that very
man. Since he himself had collected his animadversions
under the title Contra Wagner, I tagged my account with
the correlative emphasis, calling it 'Nietzsche Pro Tristan:
My theme in that chapter, put now a little too simply, was that Nietzsche remained infatuated with the
music of Tristan throughout his life. It was as late as the
last year of his sanity when Nietzsche wrote about the
'dangerous fascination' of Tristan. According to the
autobiographical Ecce Homo, the most notorious critic of
Wagner's music was still looking for a work 'of an equally
shivery and sweet infinity;' and he observed that the world
was poor for those who had never been sick enough for
its voluptuousness. It occurred to me to look for other
instances of an infatuation with the music of Tristan,
among people who were also worthy of interest for other
reasons. Not every one I investigated exhibited, as Nietzsche did, the need to pass judgment on his response.
Nor was every composer so obligingly vulnerable as the
young Guillaume Lekeu, whose motto was 'je veux ttre
emu' ("I wish to be moved"), and who, at a Bayreuth performance of Tristan, had to be carried out of the
Festspeilhaus in a faint-during the Prelude. Nor did all
the writers choose to advertise their membership by
writing a story, as Thomas Mann did, called 'Tristan;
and staging a Liebestod in a sanatorium. But in almost
every case there were biographical as well as artistic indications of that music's power- and there was sufficient
59
�evidence to warrant the composition of a history of what
I came to call, for short, 'Tristanism:
The ultimate source of my interest was, needless to
say, in my own less dramatic biography. I remember the
moment in my childhood when I heard the climactic
deceptive cadence on the radio, probably in one of the
Stokowski Symphonic Syntheses, significantly voiceless
and wordless. Whatever happened then was later reinforced by performances at the old Metropolitan, in the
Melchior-Traubel days, the tickets provided by a friend
of the family who loved Italian opera but disliked German. And so on Wagnerian Mondays I took the seat,
waiting there, enthralled, for my 'moments; and sheltered
from any premature exposure to the tunes of Verdi and
Puccini. At the same time, among high-school friends,
I defended a Dionysian Isolde against the only rival that
could be summoned up among the few recordings available to us- Marian Anderson singing the Alto Rhapsody,
which, despite its title, they took to be chaste and
Apollonian.
I was, in short, a 'Tristanite' before I ihvented the
awkward term, which I thought I needed in order to distinguish what I wished to study apart from the history
of social and literary Wagnerism. That history, as yet unwritten, would have to account for political and racial
ideas and programs for aesthetic reform which invoked
for their support half-truths about Wagner's music and
whole lies from his prose. It would be a history of doctrines and movements, such as Symbolism, Naturalism
and Aestheticism. Within that history, I thought Tristan
would have to be set apart. The political Wagnerites
seemed to me to have neglected the music-drama that
was least suited to the propagation of programs about
the Revolution, or evolutionary socialism, or the Folk.
Nor was there a special fondness for Tristan among the
doctrinaire literary Wagnerites. For the primacy of the
music tended to refute their favorite aesthetic, or
synaesthetic, doctrines.
In contrast to Wagnerism, what I chose to call
'Tristanism' began with a direct response to the music.
It was private rather than public, the result of a personal
infatuation rather than an ideological commitment. Its
history was not social but biographical. The Wagnerite
had to learn theories and cultivate habits. The Tristanite
had only to be overwhelmed. He could, to be sure, go
on to verbalize his experience in impressionistic prosepoetry, as d'Annunzio did, or the American, James
Huneker. Or he could, as a theorist, devote his energies
to analysis of the music. A composer like Chabrier or
Chausson could find the music uncomfortably recurring
in his own. And an infatuation with the music could lead
to a pondering of the myth -as when, in Mann, the
legend is ironically retold, enacted by characters for whom
the music is unwholesomely overpowering. In this respect
Mann was recapitulating the experience of Nietzsche,
who found the music more formidable than any variety
of ideological Wagernism.
As I recount the sharp distinctions I made more than
twenty years ago, I want to repudiate them as exaggerated
and fuzzy. If it were not presumptuous to do so, I would
60
quote from another repudiation, a great one, of a book
that is as deep as mine is shallow- the Attempt at a SelfCriticism that Nietzsche wrote in 1886 as a new Preface
to The Birth of a Tragedy, first published fourteen years
earlier. Let me instead remind you of two facts about
that book. First, that it was originally entitled The Birth
of Tragedy out of The Spirit of Music. Second, that the music
and the action that is described in detail- the music that
most fully represented the Dionysian force that would
save the culture from 'Socratic' opera- was that of Tristan
and Isolde. Nietzsche had not only furnished me with my
theme. He also provided the example of how one's
youthful work must be repudiated -when it is inspired
by the music of Tristan.
If I am unhappy about how I accounted for the first
hundred years, I can hardly be asked to push on to a
hundred and twenty-five. But I have another, preemptive, reason for not going on. It is the plain fact that
I haven't been keeping track. Before the book had been
published I had already moved to a province where we
don't pay proper attention to the passing scene. There
is a small college in Maryland where great books are read
as though they had just been written -which is to say
that they are studied without much help from the opinions of commentaries-and where the questions they
ask are thought of as perennial. Studying them myself,
and assisting in the intense discussions that bring them
to life- along with teaching such things as Greek and
ancient mathematics and, happily, some music theoryhave left me with less time than a chronicler should have
for keeping track of fresh views and new performances.
As a consequence of my isolation, there is probably
only one new thing that I can tell you about today's subject that you don't already know better than I. In the list
of the so-called Great Books one now can find Wagner's
Tristan and Isolde. It is 'read'- I should of course say
'heard~ in the seminars of the senior year, after weeks
of Hegel and weeks of Macx. Although many works, from
Chant to Webern, are studied in the music tutorials that
are required of all sophomores, the seminars on music
are rare events, for they average only one per year. The
others are the Matthew Passion, Don Giovanni, and,
sometimes, Verdi's Otello, on a double bill with the
Shakespearian original. Whether or not I'm teaching a
senior seminar, I encounter Tristan at least once a year,
for although we generally eschew preparatory lectures,
an exception is made in the case of me and Tristan, a combination that has, I suppose, become by now traditional.
I always set out to restrict my remarks to a simple account of Tristanesque chromaticism, with some examples
of the transformation ofleitmotives, and a sketch of the
structure of the acts. But after questions and other
promptings I must confess that I find myself holding forth
about motivations as well as motives, about love, sex,
honor, and death, and- dare I repeat it?-about my
favorite theory that although the death potion is indeed
poison, the love potion needs to be nothing stronger than
water, or, as a student once suggested, beer. Most important, I get to hear what the students think about these
matters, and to reaffirm for myself that for the young
WINTER 1984
�man or woman who is at all responsive to music, the
music of Tristan has lost none of its immediacy.
I can therefore report- and I do so to an audience
that will hardly consider it news-that well into its second century Tristan is still among the most powerful
works we have. It is still the case that it is our most telling story about the conflict between love and honor, and
about the intimacy of love and death; and in Wagner's
version that favorite theme of ours is, as Denis de Rougemont once put it, expressed in its fullest virulence. To
say that most of that power derives from the music itself
would be too repetitively obvious. So I11 risk here the
more daring opinion that the power is that of tonal music.
It is often pointed out that Wagner's chromaticism
foreshadowed what followed the tonal era. In Tristan, and
then again in Parsifal, there can he found, to take an easy
example, melodic lines that anticipate the equalizing{ almost want to say the democratizing- of the tones of
the chromatic scale. The bourgeois heirarchy of tonic and
dominant has been aufgehoben, and Tristan stands at the
threshold of the next spriritual stage, the only work more
World-Historical than the 'Eroica! Yet it seems to me that
the potency of Tristan lies not in the kind of music that
it may seem to predict, but in the effectiveness of the
musical language Wagner inherited. If the myth is in the
largest sense 'ours; the music is even more so: that of major and minor and the hierarchy of motions- drawn, I
believe, from the nature of the overtone .series- that is
one of the two or three great discoveries of European
man.
In the last paragraph there are subordinate clauses
that are Wagnerian in their grandiosity, and there is no
time here and now to substantiate them. Instead I ask
you to consider a related historical observation. It iS that
whereas most of art music has, in the twentieth century,
entered into regions beyond Wagnerian chromaticism,
indeed beyond tonal music itself, the language of popular
music- of Broadway and rock-and-roll, of country music
and the movies, even, to be sure, of most of the operas
that hold the stage- remains solidly tonal. Not often
enough is it observed that the difference between high
art and popular entertainment, which was, in the past,
a difference merely of style, is, in our time uniquely, a
difference of language.
One can sympathize with the effort to find a new
musical language. How many composers were there
whose early works were a perpetual Liebesnacht, or who
found themselves trapped on the gloomy shores of Kareol,
looking out over an empty sea? To use the only language
that was effective was to use the language whose effectiveness had already been maximally demonstrated. Tonal
music, in one sense still alive, was in another sense used
up. Beyond Tristan there lay the choice between nothing
and something new. But in another sense beyond Tristan
there lay -and there still lies- Tristan itself.
The enduring power of Tristan has, then, a two-fold
reference. There is the power of the work itself and there
is the power of the musical language in which that work
was culminatingly effective. It was this double force that
I was dealing with when I attempted to chronicle the first
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
century of Tristan's sway over sensitive souls; and it was,
perhaps, music itself, and not just an anti-Wagnerian prejudice, that prompted the later Nietzsche to judge his
fascination to be dangerous. Of the dozen or so greatest
philosophers, Nietzsche was, so far as I can tell, one of
the few who were responsive to music. Among the
moderns only Schopenhauer seems comparable in that
respect. If we go back through the centuries, we may not
stop until we get to Saint Augustine. And among the ancients, as music lover Plato stands pre-eminent.
Whomever I may have skipped in this millenial sweep,
you may notice that I hit upon two who moralized about
their musical responsiveness. One remembers Augustine
worrying about how the melisma of the chant distracted
him from the sacred words it was supposed to enhance,
and the recurrent ecclesiastical reform that dictated 'one
syllable one note! And one remembers how many modes
were banned from the ideal Republic as unsuitable for
the education of noble youth. How much, indeed, of
Homer himself would be banned, leaving a scant few of
the verses that surely represented what noble men, including Plato and Socrates themselves, must, when less
philosophically pure, have considered the most beautiful
music. But with these men a philosophical chastity seems
to have gone hand in hand with the extreme responsiveness to music. If I had known more when I chronicled
the ambivalence of the Tristanites, I would have recognized that they belong to a great tradition, not a hundred years old but twenty-five hundred. And it may very
well be that to moralize about our response, to judge its
effect upon us, to find the fascination dangerous, is the
highest tribute we can pay to the work that prompted
it. I find myself, in short, clinging to what most people
find moralistic in the full pejorative sense of the word.
But it seems to me to place a higher value on art when
we take it not simply as something to experience and admire and study but as something to judge, as we must
judge something formidable that works on the soul.
In my penultimate moments, let me give these sweeping statements a more specifically Wagnerian tum. There
is a short and very funny dialogue of Platds called the
Ion. The character Ion is a rhapsode-a reciter of epic
verse -who has won prizes for his ability to move audiences to laughter and to tears. On an unguarded day
he allows himself to be questioned by Socrates. It turns
out that there is scarcely a subject about which he knows
anything; he is ignorant both about the content of what
he recites and, except in the most limited practical way,
about the souls he can so adeptly move. Now we know
that not all actors are Ionic; there are performers-we've
met some today-who have an alert and articulate understanding of what they perform. But there are also those
who, like Ion, seem to be unable to say anything sensible about the very thoughts and feelings that they convey, with a power that therefore must be called mysterious. They are an easy target, and one wonders why Plato
should expend his satiric talents upon exposing them.
There are, however, strong hints in the dialogue that
Plato's target is a more important one, one which today
we probably consider the most important of all. For there
61
�is an analogy set out whereby we can see that as the rhapsode is to the poem he recites, so is the poet himself to
the source of his inspiration. And remember: it is no mere
versifier whose knowledge is doubted here. What Ion is
expert at reciting is nothing less than Homer, and what
is brought into question is nothing less than Homer's relation to his Goddess the Muse.
What could be a more terrible doubt to cast in an
age when poets had divine muses? And what could be
more uncomfortable than to engage in similar questioning in an age, like ours, when art seems again to be the
chief source of revelation?-art in general, but more
specifically music; and not just tonal music but that music
when it affects us most- in Wagner and, pointedly, in
Tristan. Nietzsche did such questioning, and he aimed
at what he loved most. It is well known that he accused
Wagner of being an actor, in some respects an Ion to
what he imitated, but that accusation seems relatively
petulant. But he also called Wagner a ventriloquist- the
ventriloquist, in fact, of God. What he had in mind was
something more, I think, than that Wagner gave words
and music to Wotan -and to Frau Minne. But what that
something more might be is hard to fathom in the work
of the man who also announced that God was dead.
You see how far one can go into the Beyond, when
encouraged by the loftiest of the ancient thinkers and the
wildest of the modern. To close harmoniously I must step
62
aside into the moderate and the measurable, and I can
do so only with the help of another ancient, Aristotle.
We are told in the Poetics that poetry-that is to say what
today we call art- is mimetic, and that men naturally
delight in imitation. The imitation meant here is nothing
mere, as it sometimes seems to be for Plato. Instead art
can imitate what really is, and that Aristotle thinks so
is, I believe, evident when of all the arts he calls music
the most mimetic. I take him to mean something like
this: that the rise and fall of the musical phrase expresses
the growth and decline of nature, of physis, itself.
Elsewhere he asserts something further that we also can
easily acknowledge: that music expresses character, ethos,
the motions and emotions of that most intimate manifestation of physis, the human soul.
This great and necessary mimesis is what Wagner
seemed pre-eminently able to do. He is the master of
the imitation of nature in its ordinary sense- of earth,
air, fire, and water, of forest murmurs and conflagrations
and the depths of the Rhine. But in Tristan quintessentially he showed his supreme mastery of the deeper
mimesis, that of our most elementary yet ungraspable
feelings. And he did so, I think, most marvelously in act
3, where the interweaving of thoughts, feelings, and
remembered motives leads Tristan, in his musical selfanalysis, to the conclusion that he brewed the love-potion
himself.
WINTER 1984
�In Memoriam John Gaw Meem,
1895-1983
William A. Darkey
t is an honour and a privilege for me to have this
opportunity to remember John Meem today here
in St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I was personally honoured to have had his
friendship and almost equally so, as a member
of this faculty, to have shared his sustained and sustaining friendship for this college.
I may as well begin by saying the perfectly obvious
thing: that St. John's College would never have been here
at all so beautifully on this beautiful land but for the gift
of Mr. and Mrs. Meem; nor possibly would it have survived on this campus without their continued generous
support. To say this is to say very much. But in another
way it is to say very little; for this way of putting things
omits altogether the human gifts of friendship,
understanding, inlagination, tolerance, and conviction
that lie behind those other gifts and make them humanly
meaningful. It is about these latter that I should like to
try to speak.
In 1974John Meem was made a Fellow of St.John's
College, thereby joining a small and distinguished company that includes Mark Van Doren, poet and teacher;
Ralph Kirkpatrick, musician; Paul Mellon, philanthropist. When the college took this action everyone knew
that it was very right. I should like today to address that
rightness. In remembering the qualities of his friendship
for St.John's College I shall also be speaking of the nature
of John Meem's fellowship in the college.
Since Mr. Meem's death in August, I think that all
of us have felt his presence in ways that are new,
heightened, and sharpened for us ii!- our awareness of
I
John Gaw Meem and his wife, Faith, have been principal benefactors of St.
John's southwestem campus from its inception. Mr. Meem died last August.
William A. Darkey, tutor and former dean on the Santa Fe campus, delivered
these remarks at memorial' services at the college on 7 November 1983.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
his absence. One of these ways, for me, has been to see
again, with new eyes, the beautiful buildings which
realize his vision of the city and which we see as we go
about Santa Fe in the pursuit of our daily lives. For me
these principally have been the Presbyterian Church,
Christo Rey, the Berardinelli Building, the Courthouse,
St. Francis School, and most of all St. John's College
every day. These, and also the gracious private homes
that he designed, and the historic buildings that he helped
to preserve. His presence is everywhere in the heart of
Santa Fe.
It has come to me that these buildings are not merely
beautiful, though they are, but that they are also, and
more importantly, exp~essions and realizations of a vision of human civility. For most of human life is acted
out in buildings, public buildings and private buildings.
These were the two focuses of human life to which John
Meem devoted his gifts and his energies. On the one
hand, churches, government buildings, schools, colleges,
museums, universities, libraries, and on the other,
domestic dwellings. Public buildings and private
buildings together constituting the vision of a city.
John Meem had a marvelous sense of the public and
the private, and of the distinction between them. One
recognized in meeting him, that, although he gave of
himself most generously, he was a deeply private man.
And yet, if any one in Santa Fe had been asked to name
our outstanding public citizen, John Meem's name would
have been first on any lips. I think he knew deeply in
his nature that unless this distinction is firmly and
discriminatingly made, neither public or private life is
possible, and life itself becomes inhuman. His buildings
say this to us. I think they are meant to mediate between
the land and the community with its traditions, and its
necessary institutions on the one hand and the individual
living persons on the other.
63
�He understood well that buildings must accommodate to human needs. In the first year of this campus when the walkways were incomplete, the subject
human traditions in his speculation about his own art
came up between us, and he said, "I'm waiting to see
arts. For Architecture so conceived and so practiced is
where they go before I finish putting the walks in. It's
no use trying to force people to walk where you think
they should. They won't do it."
Or, you'll notice that wherever you walk on the campus, the buildings are set so that they shelter you from
the overwhelming space of New Mexican light and
distance; and yet they always let you look out into that
truly a liberal art. That is the rightness of John Meem
as a Fellow of this college. For the office of the Fellows
is to keep us mindful, in whatever ways they have, and
perhaps mainly by example, of what we ought to be, of
what we ought to be in practice in the world.
I should like now to return from these somewhat
abstract thoughts to the immediacies of the relationships
between John Meem and the college. He served on our
Board of Visitors and Governors. Whenever he could,
he attended college functions, including commencements, convocations, and community seminars of
which he was a most thoughtful member. He often
walked on the campus in the early morning with his dogs.
I have wondered what he actually thought of us, of this
actual incarnation of the idea, what he actually thought
of all of us here.
When I let my thoughts go in this direction, I am
amazed at the courage, the trust, and the generosity of
spirit out of which Mr. and Mrs. Meem proposed to put
this college literally in their own backyard, not just to
give us a plot of unoccupied land somewhere, but to invite us to be their neighbor and to share with us the very
piece of land on which they lived. i Que cosa!
I think Mr. Meem has taught us something about
neighborhood in a way wonderfully characteristic of him.
If you walk a hundred yards or so down the path behind
this building, you come to a fence and a gate between
college property and the Meems' property. The fence
is two strands of plain wire that you can step through
easily anywhere. The gate can be opened easily, and,
to judge by the footpath, it is opened fairly often; but
in my experience, it has always been closed again afterwards. I infer that a lesson has been taught and learnt
about the private and the public.
A verse from Isaiah says, ''Your old men dream
dreams and your young men see visions." John Meem
saw visions certainly, and he dreamt dreams about the
civility of human community. Those visions stand realized beautifully in Santa Fe and elsewhere in New Mexico. As it turned out, St. John's College was destined
to be a part of his dream. I am convinced that his dream
was in essence the same one that the architects of the
St. John's Program had dreamt in 1937. The dream is
that a well conceived program of liberal education,
soundly rooted in the past and thoughtfully directed to
the present, will lead young men and women to see visions of the good life, both private and public, and that
they will give their lives to working out their visions in
the world.
During the past few .weeks I have been reading the
Canterbury Tales with some Juniors and Seniors. Three
lines of Chaucer's incomparable verse insist that I say
them for John Meem.
distance.
One evening I was standing with Mr. Meem on the
terrace of his own beautiful home looking southward to
Sandia, and I made some remark, still with an unac-
commodated easterner's eye and soul, that I found the
land overwhelming and often frightening. He said
simply, still looking south, "I love it." And then, after
a pause, he said, "It gave me my life."
I felt that he had a deep sense of returning that gift
in his stewardship of this New Mexican land and its traditions. He liked to let the land lie and be what it would
of itself. I once remarked on some very large and undisturbed anthills in front of his house. He said, ''Yes,
aren't they lovely? They were there when we moved
here."
He made himself a part of this country in a most
thorough way. He knew the Indian culture and the
Spanish culture, not vaguely or sentimentally, but very
well, beginning from the precision of his profession, and
extending far beyond any narrow sense of architecture
into the culture of which that architecture is a manifestation. From his understanding of these New Mexico traditions and his sympathy with them, he developed his own
architectural style. His development of his own style unfolded from those traditions new possibilities for meeting
contemporary needs in ways which harmonize and join
with their living roots in the past.
I remember talking with Mr. Meem about Sir Basil
Spence's book, Phoenix at Coventry, which tells of the
building of the great new cathedral there after World
War II. As an epigraph to his book Spence quotes these
words of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok:
Only a fool will build in defiance of the past. What is new
and significant always must be grafted to old roots, the truly
vital roots that are chosen with great care from the ones
that merely survive. And what a slow and delicate process
it is to distinguish radical vitality from the wastes of mere
survival, but that is the only way to achieve progress instead of disaster.
It has seemed to me that Bartok here expresses John
Meem's own sense of architecture as a human art that
assists us with our deepest human institutions. And I
have wondered whether it could have been this sense of
things that moved him to approve and to foster St. John's
College; in part simply as the gift outright of a college
to the State of New Mexico; but also as the very special
gift to a very special college whose professed goal is to
study the past, to find what is vital there and then to
build upon that in the present and into the future. I do
64
think that it may well have been this understanding of
that led him to foster the St. John's program of liberal
He nevere yet no vileinye ne sayde
In all his lyfe unto no maner wight.
He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght.
WINTER 1984
�
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Sterling, J. Walter
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Lord, Susan
Freis, S. Richard
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
von Oppen, Beate Ruhm
Kojeve, Alexandre
Lederer, Wolfgang
Zuckerman, Elliott
Carey, James
Fontaine, John
Darkey, William A.
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�Editor:
]. Walter Sterling
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Susan Lord
Editorial Board:
Eva Brann
S. Richard Freis, Alumni Representative
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
Curtis A. Wilson
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
The St. John's Review (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler,
Dean. Published thrice yearly, in the autumn-winter, winterspring, and summer. For those not on the distribution list,
subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for two years, or $36.00
for three years, payable in advance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIV
SUMMER 1983
Number 3
© 1983, St. John's College; "Mission over Hanoi," © 1983,
James Webb. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in
part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Randall Hall, from an etching by F. Town send Morgan.
Composition: Action Camp Co., Inc.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
�fhe St. John's Review, Summer 1983
3
Homo Loquens from a Biological Standpoint
Curtis A. Wilson
18
Solstice on the First Watch (poem) }. H. Beall
19
The Ground of Nature: Shakespeare,
Language, and Politics Paul A. Cantor
25
Nominal Autobiography in Shakespeare's Sonnets
Margreta de Grazia
32
Blackwater (poem) RobertS. Zelenka
33
Mission over Hanoi (narrative from A Country
Such as This) james Webb
41
Truth-Telling and the Iliad Douglas Allanbrook
51
The Supreme Court and School Desegregation:
Brown v. Board of Education Reconsidered
Murray Dry
63
OCCASIONAL DISCOURSES
Class Day Address 1983
Chaninah Maschler
64
The Horizon as the Last Ship Home (poem) }. H. Beall
65
Against Time Eva Brann
��Homo Loquens
from a
Biological Standpoint
Curtis A.Wilson
The words homo loquens, in the title I announced for
this lecture, mean speaking man, man the speaking one. As
a designation for the human species, homo loquens perhaps has an advantage over the official zoological designation, homo sapiens, man the sapient, wise, discerning one,
the one who savours the essences of things. The human
capacity for loquaciousness is somewhat more obviously
verifiable. But what has that capacity to do with things bio·
logical? This is a complicated and problematic topic. Forgive me if I first approach it by slow stages, then attempt a
gingerly step when the going becomes treacherous. I wish
to begin with a small technical matter, an aspect of the
physiology of speech-production.
Respiratory patterns in different species of air-breathing
vertebrates differ in many details. Different species have
special regulatory systems, adapted to special behavior
patterns. There is the panting of dogs, specially adapted
for cooling; birds, during flight, have the unique ability to
increase their intake of oxygen a hundredfold; the sperm
whale can go without breathing or dive for 90 minutes, the
beaver for 15, man for about 2 1/2; and so on. All these
differences are species-specific.
In a human being, the respiratory patterns during quiet
breathing and during speech are remarkably different (see
Table I). The volume of air inhaled, as shown in the first
item of the table, increases by a factor of 3 or 4 during
speech. The time of inspiration, as compared with the
A lecture delivered at Annapolis in September 1975.
In forthcoming issues the Review intends to publish Mr. Wilson's lectures, The Arcltimedean Point and the Liberal Arts (September 1958) and
Groups, Rings and Lattices (September 1959).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
time for a complete cycle of inspiration plus expiration, decreases by a factor of 3. The number of breaths per minute
tends to decrease drastically. Expiration, which is smooth
during speechless breathing, is periodically interrupted
during speech, with a build-up of pressure under the glottis; it is during expiration that all normal human vocalization occurs. The patterns of electrical activity in expiratory and inspiratory muscles differ radically during quiet
breathing and during speech. Both chest and abdominal
musculature are utilized in breathing, but during speech
the abdominal musculature is less involved, and its contractions are no longer fully synchronized with those of
the chest musculature. In quiet breathing, one breathes
primarily through the nose; during speech, primarily
through the mouth.
More than you wanted to know, I'm sure. My point was
to show that breathing undergoes marked changes during
speech. And remarkably, humans can tolerate these modifications for almost unlimited periods of time without ex·
periencing respiratory distress; witness filibusters in the
U.S. Senate. Think now of other voluntary departures
from normal breathing patterns. If we deliberately decide
to breathe at some arbitrary rate, say, faster than ordinary
-please do not try it here-we quickly experience the
symptoms of hyperventilation: light-headedness, giddiness, and so on. Similar phenomena may occur when one
is learning to play a wind instrument or during singing instruction; training in proper breathing is requisite for
these undertakings. By contrast, talking a blue streak for
hours on end comes naturally to many a three-year-old.
The conclusion must be that there are sensitive controlling mechanisms that regulate ventilation in an autono·
mons way during speech. More generally, it is evident that
3
�we are endowed with special anatomical and physiological
adaptations that enable us to sustain speech for hours, on
exhaled air.
Do we speak the way we do because we happen to possess these special adaptations, or did these adaptations develop during evolution in response to the pressures of natural selection or the charms of sexual selection? I think
there is no way of answering these questions; it is difficult
enough when one can refer to skeletons, which fossilize;
behavioral traits do not. But whatever the answer, there is
still this further question, whether the genetic programming for speech extends beyond the mere provision of vocal apparatus? Might it not, in addition, determine the
make-up and structure of language in a more detailed and
intimate fashion?
Such a question runs counter to views that are widely
held. Is not language, after you have the voice to pronounce it with, fundamentally a psychological and cultural
fact, to which biological explanations would be largely irrelevant? Do not languages consist of arbitrary conventions, made up in the way we make up the rules of games?
Wittgenstein speaks of language as a word-game, thereby
likening it to tennis or poker. Is it not apparent that the
conventions of any particular language, like the rules of
tennis or poker, are transmitted from generation to generation by means of imitation, training, teaching, and learn~
ing? Are not these the important facts about language, the
facts that reveal to us its nature?
Until recently, students of linguistics and psychology
have tended uniformly to answer these questions in the
affirmative. To many, the extraordinary diversity of human tongues has seemed argumerit enough against any assumption of linguistic universals, that is, characteristics of
language imagined to be rooted in human nature. The reductio ad absurdum often mentioned is the attempt of the
Egyptian king Psammetichos to determine the original human language. As reported by Herodotus, Psammetichos
caused two children to be raised in such a way that they
would neither hear nor overhear human speech, the attendants being instructed meanwhile to listen out for their
first word. The report was, that it was Persian. The experiment is said to have been repeated in the 13th century by
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and again around
1500 by James IV of Scotland, who was hoping that the
children would speak Hebrew, and thereby establish a biblical lineage for Scotland. No result was reported.
Stress on the arbitrariness of language has been enhanced by a coalition between linguistics and behaviorist
psychology. Behaviorist psychology is led, by its premisses, to the view that language is merely an arbitrary use to
which the human constitution, anatomical and physiological, can be put, just as a tool can be put to many arbitrary
uses by its manipulator. A recent account that views language in this way is the book Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner. Along with other behaviorist scientists, Skinner holds
that all learning can be explained by a few principles
4
which operate in all vertebrates and many invertebrates.
The process is called operant conditioning. Learning the
meaning of a word, Skinner holds, is like a rat's learning to
press a bar which will cause a buzzer to sound, announcing
"food pellets soon to come". Learning grammar, likewise,
is supposed to be like learning that event A is followed by
event B, which is in turn followed by event C. Many an
animal can be trained to acquire associations of this kind.
Skinner would hold that there is nothing involved in the
acquisition of language that is not involved in learning of
this kind.
Unquestionably, we would be mistaken to deny the importance or the power of the conditioned reflex, either in
language acquisition or in other learning. The experimental psychologists have recently announced that even the
visceral organs can be taught to do various things, on given
signals, with rewards provided immediately afterward to
reinforce the action. We are told that rats, with the reward
held out of another shot of electrical juice in a certain center of the brain, have been taught to alter their blood pressures or brain waves, or dilate the blood vessels in one ear
more than those in the other. Similar achievements in
operant conditioning are held out as a bright future hope
for humans. What rich experiences in self-operation are
not in store for us?
On the other hand, the successes of this technology do not
necessarily tell us much about the character of what it is that
is being conditioned. The behaviorist treats the organism as a
black box; he controls the inputs and records the outputs;
what goes on in the box is not, as he claims, an appropriate
concern of his. He cites the similar situation in quantum
physics. In the case of quantum phenomena, the physicist
cannot successfully describe what is there when he is not
looking, not using probes that interact with whatever it is.
But, between the situation in quantum physics and the situation in the study of animal behavior, there is this difference.
Animal behavior goes on, observably so, even when the ani-
mals are not being experimented on. May it not be important
to try to observe this behavior, before we set out to change it,
as we can, so frighteningly, do?
Those who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitats nowadays have a special name for their study,
Ethology. Long hours of patient observation, much of it
during the last 50 years, have demonstrated how intricate,
how unexpectedly adaptive, how downright peculiar, are
the patterns of behavior specific to particular species of
animals. Many of the patterns function as communica-
tion: the elaborate courtship rituals of birds, the less elaborate ones of butterflies and certain fish; the way in which
two dabbling ducks, on meeting, lower their bills into the
water and pretend to drink, as an indication of nonaggressiveness; and so on. Among these behaviors, there is one
that has been called truly symbolic. That is the dance of
the honeybee, the symbolism of which was first recognized and deciphered by Karl von Frisch in the 1940's. Let
me describe it briefly (see Figure l).
SUMMER 1983
�The dance that a forager bee performs in the dark hive
gives, by a special symbolism, the dista,nce and direction of
the food source she has found. If, for the Austrian variety
of bee, the food source is less than 80 meters away, she
performs a round dance, running rapidly around in a circle,
first to the left, then to the right. This in effect says to the
hive bees: "Fly out from the hive; close by in the neighborhood is food to be fetched."
If, on the other hand, the food source is more than 80
meters away, the forager will use the tail-wagging dance.
The rhythm of the dance tells the distance: the closer the
source, the more figure-of-eight cycles of the dance per ·
minute. The tail-wagging part of the dance, shown by the
middle wavy line in the diagram, tells the direction, in accordance with a curious rule. On the vertical honeycomb
in the hive, the direction up means towards the sun, and
the direction down means away from the sun. If the tailwagging run points 60° left of straight up, the food source
is 60° to the left of the sun, and so on. Directions with
respect to the sun have been transposed into directions
with respect to gravity, the directions are reported with errors of less than 3o.
This same dance is used in the springtime when half the
bees move out of the hive and form a swarm, seeking a
new nesting place. Scout bees fly out in all directions, then
return and dance to announce the location they have hit
on. It is important, of course, that the selected spot be
protected from winter, winds, and rough weather, and that
there be abundant feeding nearby. The surprising thing is
that not just one nesting place is announced, but several at
the same time. The dancing and the coming and going can
continue for days. By their dances the bees engage in mutual persuasion, inciting one another to inspect this site or
that site. The better the site, the longer and more vigorously the returning bee dances. The process continues until all the scout bees are dancing in the same direction and
at the same rate. Then the swarm arises and departs for
the homesite it has thus decided upon. Mistaken decisions
are few.
The dance of the honeybee is symbolic in a genetically
determined way. That human language is not genetically
determined in the same way is easy to show: the language
a child learns, whether Swahili, Cantonese, Urdu, or any
other, depends solely on the language of those by whom
he is brought up.
The vocabulary of a human language is not genetically
fixed. I do not believe, however, that the discussion of the
biological foundations oflanguage can properly end at this
point.
My reasons for saying this are two. In the first place,
there are certain features of human speech which are not
facts appear to be most easily accounted for by assuming
that there is such a foundation, forcing human speech to
be of a certain basic type.
Secondly, this same assumption receives support from
the study of primary language acquisition in children. It is
not that Psammetichos was right, or that children if left to
themselves would commence to speak proto-IndoEuropean or any language resembling an adult human language. All genetically determined traits depend for their
appearance, to a greater or lesser degree, on features of the
environment. The genes or genetic factors do not of themselves determine body parts or physiological or behavioral
traits. Rather, they determine developmental processes,
which normally succeed one another in a determinate
way, but can be profoundly affected by environmental influence. These facts point to the possibility that genetically determined traits might appear only in the course of
maturation, and then only in response to specific influences from outside the organism. Ethologists inform us of
many instances of species-specific, genetically based behavior that emerge only in this way. An example is imprinting. Thomas More described it in his Utopia. Chicks
or ducklings or goslings, a few hours or days after hatching,
enter a critical period. Whatever object they first encounter during this period, within certain limits of size, and
moving within appropriate limits of speed, they begin to
follow, and continue to follow through childhood. The object followed can be, and usually is, the mother; but it can
also be an ethologist like Konrad Korenz on his hands and
knees, or something stuffed at the end of a stick. Failure to
develop imprinted responses during infancy may cause behavioral abnormalities in the adult bird-abnormalities
that cannot be corrected by later training. Imprinting is
only one of many known species-specific characteristics or
behaviors that appear in the course of development, in response to what are sometimes called "releasers", environ-
mental stimuli of specified kinds. It will be my contention
that important features of human linguistic capacity are of
this kind.
After discussing these two points, I shall conclude with
certain reflections on what they might mean.
I begin, then, with three features of human speech that
do not appear to be found in the natural communication
systems of animals (see Table II):
l. Phonematization
2. Concatenation
3. Grammar
What is meant by phonematization? The vocalizations
heard in the human languages of the world are always
within fairly narrow limits of the total range of sounds that
humans can produce. We are able to imitate, for instance,
found in the natural communication systems of animals,
the vocalizations of mammals and birds with considerable
but which are found universally in all known human languages, present or past. The existence of these features is,
at the very least, consonant with the possibility that there
is a genetic foundation underlying human speech. The
accuracy, given a little training, but such direct imitations
never seem to be incorporated in the vocabularies of hu-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
man languages. In all human languages, the meaningful
units, words, or more strictly speaking, morphemes, are di-
5
�visible into successive, shorter, meaningless sounds called
phonemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units
into which an utterance can be divided. A morpheme can
be a single word such as ' water"; it can be more than one
word as in "spick and span"; and it can be less than a single
word, as in the "er" in "whiter", which turns the adjective
1
"white" into a comparative. Phonemes are the meaning-
less sounds into which morphemes can be divided. A pho·
neme is not, strictly speaking, a single sound, but rather a
small class of sounds; it can be defined as the smallest distinctive unit functioning within the sound system of alanguage to make a difference. Refinements aside, the central
fact I wish to convey is this: in all languages, morphemes
are constituted by sequences of phonemes. This is a fact
that the inventors of the alphabet were probably about the
first to come to understand.
The fact could have been different. One can imagine a
language in which the symbol for a cat was a sound resembling a miaow; in which size was represented by loudness,
color by vowel quality, and hunger by a strident roar. Morphemes in such a language would not be analyzable into
phonemes.
All human languages are phonematized, but each language uses a somewhat different set of phonemes, in each
case a small set.
Parrots and mynah birds excel other animals in the imitation of human speech, but it is doubtful that they speak
in phonemes. The matter could be put to a test. A parrot
that had heard only Portuguese, and had acquired a good
repertory of Portuguese words and phrases, could be transferred into an environment where he would hear only English, and have the opportunity of repeating English exclamatory remarks. If these remarks emerged with a
Portuguese accent, then it would be clear that the parrot
had learned Portuguese phonemes, which he proceeded to
use in the vocalization of English words. In the opposite
case, we would conclude that the parrot had the capacity
to imitate sounds accurately, but had not acquired the
habit of using phonemes for the production of speech.
In the human child, speech by the same test would turn
out to be phonematized.
The second general characteristic of human speech I
have listed is concatenation. Human utterances seldom
consist of single morphemes in isolation; in no human
speech-community are utterances restricted to single morphemes; in all languages, morphemes are ordinarily strung
together into sequences. To be sure, the peoples of many,
perhaps most cultures, are less garrulous than we; they use
language only in certain circumstances and only somewhat sparingly, while we talk a good deal of the time. It is
nevertheless true that humans in all speech-communities
concatenate morphemes.
The third property presupposes concatenation; it is the
property of grammatical or syntactical structure. By
"structure" I am going to mean a set of relations that can
be diagrammed. In no language are morphemes strung to-
6
gether in purely random order. Native speakers of a language normally agree in rejecting certain utterances as ungrammatical, and in recognizing certain other utterances
as grammatical. According to Noam Chomsky, for instance, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatical, though meaningless or nearly so;
the concatenation "furiously sleep ideas green colorless",
the same words in reverse order, is ungrammatical. The
one concatenation admits of a syntactical diagram, the
other does not.
It is generally assumed in linguistics that the grammar of
a language is completely describable by means of a finite
and in fact small set of formal rules. For no natural language has such a description been achieved as yet, otherwise one could program a computer to utter the grammatical sentences in the language. Apparently the mechanism
involved in the grammar of a natural language is complex.
I shall return to this topic again; the point now is just the
universality of grammar-a relatively complex kind of system-as a feature of human languages.
All three properties I have described are, so far as the
available evidence indicates, without cultural histories.
Phonematization, concatenation, grammatical structure,
are features of all known human language, past or present.
And although languages are always in process of change, it
is not the case that these changes follow a general pattern
from a stage that can be called primitive to one that can be
called advanced. No known classification or analysis of human languages provides any basis for a theory of the development oflanguage from aphonemic, non-grammatical, or
simple imitative beginnings.
These facts are consonant with the hypothesis that
there is a genetic foundation underlying human speech,
forcing it to be of a certain basic type, and in particular, to
have the features I have just described. In support of this
hypothesis, I take up now the development of language in
the child.
The first sound a child makes is to cry. Immanuel Kant
says the birth cry
has not the tone of lamentation, but of indignation and of
aroused wrath; presumably because [the child} wants to
move, and feels his inability to do so as a fetter that deprives
him of his freedom.
More recently a psychoanalyst has written of the birthcry:
It is an expression of the infant's overwhelming sense of inferiority on thus suddenly being confronted by reality, without
ever having had to deal with its problems.
In view of the anatomical immaturity of the human brain
at birth, these adult interpretations are rather surprising.
No doubt the infant in being born undergoes a rude shock.
But crying is a mechanism with a number of important
functions; one of the earliest is clearing fluid out of the
SUMMER 1983
�middle ear, so that the child can begil) to hear. The mechanism is ready to operate at birth, and ,the infant puts it to
work. The sound made in crying changes slightly during
childhood, but otherwise does not mature or change during one's life. Crying is not a first step in the development
that leads to articulate speech; it involves no articulation;
the infant simply blows his horn without operating the
keys.
A quite distinct sort of vocalization begins at about the
6th or 8th week after birth: little cooing sounds that appear
to be elicited by a specific stimulus, a nodding object resembling a face in the baby's visual field. A clown's face
painted on cardboard, laughing or crying, will do for a
while. The response is first smiling, then cooing. After
about 13 weeks it is necessary that the face be a familiar
one to elicit the smiling and cooing. During cooing, some
articulatory organs are moving, in particular the tongue.
The cooing sounds, although tending to be vowel-like, are
not identical with any actual speech sounds. Gradually
they become differentiated. At 6 months they include vocalic and consonantal components, like /p/ and /b/. Cooing develops into babbling resembling one-syllable utterances, for instance /rna/, /mu/, Ida/, /di/. However, the
babbling sounds are still not those of adult speech.
The first strictly linguistic feature to emerge in a child's
vocalizations is contour of intonation. Before the sound sequences have determinable meaning or definite phonemic
structure, they come out with the recognizable intonation
of questions, exclamations, or affirmations. Linguistic de-
velopment begins not with the putting together of individual components, but rather with a whole tonal pattern.
Later, this whole becomes differentiated into component
parts. Differentiation of phonemes is only approximate at
first and has to be progressively refined. The child is gradually gaining control of the dozen or so adjustments in the
vocal organs that are required for adult speech. By 12
months he is replicating syllables, as in "mamma" and
"dada". By 18 months he will normally have a repertory of
three to 50 recognizable words.
I have described this development as though mothers
were not trying to teach, but of course they normally are.
It is nevertheless a striking fact that these stages emerge in
different cultures in the same sequence and at very nearly
the same ages, and in fairly strict correlation with other
motor achievements. Detailed studies have been made of
speech acquisition among the Zuni of New Mexico, the
Dani of Dutch New Guinea, the Bororo in central Brazil,
and children in urban U.S.A.; in all cases, intonation patterns become distinct at about the time that grasping between thumb and fingers develops; the first words appear
at about the time that walking is accomplished; and by the
time the child is able to jump, tiptoe, and walk backward,
he is talking a blue streak. Among children born deaf, the
development from cooing through spontaneous babbling
to well-articulated speech-sounds occurs as with normal
children, but of course the development cannot continue
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
onward into the stage at which adult words are learned
through hearing. Among the mentally retarded, these developments are chronologically delayed, but take place
with the same correlation between various motor achieve-
ments. Given the variety of environmental conditions in
these several cases, it seems plausible to attribute the
emergence of linguistic habits largely to maturational
changes within the growing child, rather than to particular
training procedures.
The specific neurophysiological correlates of speech are
little known, but that there are such correlates and that
they mature as speech develops is supported by much evidence. The human brain at birth has only 24% of its adult
weight; by contrast, the chimpanzee starts life with a brain
that already weighs 60% of its adult value. The human
brain takes longer to mature, and more happens as it matures, including principally a large increase in the number
of neuronal connections. A large part of the discernible anatomical maturation takes place in the first two years; the
process appears to be complete by about 14 years of age.
By this time the neurophysical basis of linguistic capacity
has become localized in one of the two cerebral hemispheres, usually the left. If by this time a first language has
not been learned, no language will ever be learned. Speech
defects due to injuries to the brain that occur before the
finallateralization of the speech-function are usually overcome; but if the injury comes after lateralization, the
speech defect will be permanent.
Capacity for speech does not correlate uniformly with
size of brain. There is a condition known as nanocephalic
dwarfism, in which humans appear reduced to fairy-tale
size; adult individuals attain a maximum height of between two and three feet (see Table III). Nanocephalic
dwarfs differ from other dwarfs in preserving the skeletal
and other bodily proportions of normal adults. Brain
weight in these dwarfs barely exceeds that of a normal
newborn infant. The brain weight of the nanocephalic
dwarf, given in the middle row, is only a little over a third
of that of a 2 !12 year old boy, but the ratio of body weight
to brain weight is equal to that of a 13 !12 year old boy.
These dwarfs show some retardation in intellectual
growth, and often do not surpass a mental age-level of 5 or
6 years. But all of them acquire the rudiments of language,
including speaking and understanding; they speak grammatically, and can manufacture sentences which are not
mere repetitions of sentences they have heard. The appropriate conclusion appears to be that the ability to acquire
language depends, not on any purely quantitative factor,
but on specific modes of organization of human neurophysiology.
One further point concerning the neurophysiological
basis of language. The main evidence here is provided by
aphasias (aphasis = " + </Java<, not + to speak). These are
failures in production or comprehension of language, re-
sulting from injuries to the brain. And this evidence argues, for one thing, against regarding language ability as
7
�being encoded simply in a spatial layout of some kind, say
a network of associations in the cerebral cortex. Subcortical areas are involved, as well as cortex. The aphasias most
frequently involve, not disruption of associations, but
rather disruption of temporal order, affecting either phonemes in the production of
words~
as in spoonerisms, or
words and phrases in the production of sentences. The patient is unable to control properly the temporal ordering of
these units, and as a consequence they tumble into the
production line uninhibited by higher syntactic principles.
In general, the symptom is lack of availability of the right
thing at the right time.
Language is through-and-through an affair of temporal
patterns and sequences. The neurophysiological organization required for this cannot be simply that of associations.
In the making of speech-sounds, for instance, certain mus-
cles have to contract, the efferent nerve fibers innervating
these muscles are of different lengths and diameters, and
as a consequence the times required for a nerve impulse to
tion, in which elements connected with one another are
separated temporally in the production line.
Let me return now to the description of stages in the
primary acquisition of language by a child.
At about the end of the first year of life, the child normally utters his first unmistakable word. For a number of
months, while the child is building up a repertory of about
50 words, he utters only single-word utterances. He frequently hears sentences like "Here is your milk", "Shall
daddy take you by-by?", and so on, but he will neither join
together any two words he knows nor can he be induced to
do so on request. Does he lack the memory or the vocalizing power to produce a two-word utterance? The evidence
is against these suppositions. Then, roughly between 18
and 24 months, he suddenly and spontaneously begins to
join words into two-element phrases: "up baby", "baby
highchair", "push car", and so on. What explains the shift?
An important observation at the one-word stage is that
these single words are given the intonations or pitch-con-
go from brain to muscle differ for different muscles.
Hence the nerve impulses for the production of a single
phoneme must be fired off from the brain at different
times, and the sequences of impulses for successive phonemes must overlap in complex ways. In the simplest sequential order of events, it thus appears that events are
tours of declarative, interrogative, or hortatory sentences.
The single-word utterances seem to function in meaning
selected, not in response to immediately prior events, but
single-word utterances, both "push" and "car" would have
primary stresses and terminal- intonation contours. But
in the same way as sentences will function later on: "Doggie" might mean, for instance, ~'There is a dog". When the
two-word construction ''push car" appears, it is not just
two single-word utterances spoken in a certain order. As
in accordance with a hierarchic plan that integrates the requirements for periods of time of several seconds' duration. All this patterning in time is thought to depend on a
physiological rhythm of about 6 cyles per second, in relation to which other events are timed. Arrangements of this
complexity do not come about by learning. The evidence
here, as well as the observations I have already described
as to the way voice-sounds develop in children, points to
the existence of an innate mechanism for the production
of phonemes, one which is activated by a specific input,
the appearance of the human face, and which matures in
stages.
Could anything similar be argued for competence in syntax, the ability to understand and produce grammatical sentences? Here you will undoubtedly be more doubtful, for
surely the grammars of different languages are different.
Please recall that the sets of phonemes used in different languages are also somewhat different. The universality of
phonematization is compatible with different languages
employing different subsets of the humanly possible phonemes. The claim for universality of grammar must be of
similar kind. The grammars of human languages are not of
just any imaginable kind of ordered concatenation of morphemes. Rather, they derive from a certain subclass of the
gressive differentiation of the parts of utterances on the
other.
Imitation plays a role in this process, but it is seldom
mere parroting. In Table IV I have listed some imitations
actually produced by two children, whom I shall call Adam
and Eve; both were about two years old.
First note that the imitations preserve the word order of
the model, even when not preserving all the words. This is
not a logical necessity; it is conceivable that the child
might reverse or scramble the order; that he does not suggests that he is processing the utterance as a whole. A second fact to notice is that, when the models increase in
length, the child's imitation is a reduction, and that the
imaginable orders, a subclass involving phrase structure and
selection of words is not random. The words retained are
what has been called "deep structure". The production of
grammatical sentences turns out to pose requirements simi-
generally nouns, verbs, and less often adjectives: words
sometimes called "contentives", because they have se-
lar to those necessary for the temporal ordering of pho-
mantic content; their main grammatical function lies in
nemes; a serial order in which one clement determines the
next is insufficient; there has to be hierarchical organiza-
their capacity to refer to things. The forms omitted are
what linguists call "functors", their grammatical functions
8
when they are two words programmed as a single utterance,
the primary stress and higher pitch come on "car"; and the
unity of the whole is indicated by the absence of a terminal
pitch contour between the words and the presence of such a
contour at the end of the sequence.
What appears to be happening is that the child is by
stages increasing his span, his ability to plan or program
longer utterances. Grammar is already present in embryo.
Further development will be a process of successive increases in span or integration, on the one hand, and pro-
SUMMER l983
�being more obvious than their semantic content. The
omission of the functors leads to a kind of telegraphic language, such as one uses in wiring home: ('Car broken
down; wallet stolen; send money American Express Baghdad". In the child's telegraphic utterances, how will the
appropriate functors come to be introduced?
While the child engages in imitating, with reductions,
the utterances of the mother, the mother frequently imitates, with expansion, the utterances of the child (see Table V). The mother's expansions, you will note, preserve
the word order of the child's sentences, she acts as if the
child meant everything he said, and more, and it is the
"more" that her additions articulate. She adds functors.
The functors have meaning, but it is meaning that accrues
to them in context rather than in isolation. The functors
tell the time of the action, whether it is ongoing or completed; they inform us of possession, and of relations such
as are indicated by prepositions like in, on, up, down; they
distinguish between a particular instance of a class as in
"the highchair", and an arbitrary instance of a class, as in
"a sandwich"; and so on.
How or to what extent these adult expansions of the
child's utterances help the child to learn grammatical usage is uncertain. It has been found that immediate imitations by the child of just uttered adult sentences are less
frequently well-formed than spontaneously produced utterances. The view that progress toward adult norms arises
merely from practice in overt imitation of adult sentences
is clearly wrong. The child rather appears to be elaborating
his own grammar, making use of adult models, but constantly analogizing to produce new and often mistaken
words or forms.
Take pluralization (see Table VI). In English there are a
few irregular plurals, as of mouse, foot, man. The child normally regularizes these plurals: mouses, foots, mans. Instead of foot vs. foots, some children give feet for the singular, feels for the plural. One does not get an initial
fluctuation between foot and feet, such as one would expect if only imitation of adult forms were at work.
Most English plurals are regular and follow certain formal rules. Thus we have mat vs. mats, but match vs.
matches. Words ending in sibilants, such as match, horse,
box, add a vowel before the s of the plural. Children have
difficulty with pluralizing these words, and tend at first to
use the singular form for both singular and plural. Sometimes a child will analogize in such a way as to remove the
sibilant, substituting for instance, for box vs. boxes, the singular-plural pair bok vs. boks. Then at some point the child
produces the regular plural of a sibilant word, say, boxes.
Frequently when this happens he may abandon temporarily the regular plural for non-sibilant words, so that one
gets foot vs. footses. What is happening? Overlaid on the
child's systematic analogic forms, there is a gradual accumulation of successful imitations which do not fit the
child's system. Eventually these result in a change in the
system, often with errors due to over-generalizing.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Consider also the past tense inflection, which in English
bears considerable similarity to the plural inflection (see
Table VI again). There are regular forms like walk-walked,
and irregular ones like go-went. Among the regular verbs,
the form of the past depends on the final phoneme of the
simple verb: so we have pack-packed and pat-patted. In the
case of past-tense inflection in contrast with pluralization,
however, the most frequently used forms are irregular, and
the curious fact is that the child often starts regularizing
these forms before having been heard to produce any
other past-tense forms. Thus goed, doed, corned appear
among the first past-tense forms produced. The analogizing tendency is evidently very strong.
The occurrence of certain kinds of errors on the level of
word construction thus reveals the child's effort to induce
regularities from the speech he is exposed to. When a child
says, "I buyed a fire car for a grillion dollars," he is not imitating in any strict sense of the term; he is constructing in
accordance with rules, rules which, in adult English, are in
part mistaken. At every stage, the child's linguistic competence extends beyond the sum total of the sentences he
has heard. He is able to understand and construct sentences which he cannot have heard before, but which are
well-formed in terms of general rules that are implicit in
the sentences he has heard. Somehow, genius that he is,
he induces from the speech to which he is exposed a latent
structure of rules. For the rest of his life, he will be spinning out the implications of this latent structure.
By way of illustration of this inductive process, and of a
further stage in the achievement of grammatical competence, let me indicate some aspects of the development of
the noun phrase in children's speech (see Table VII). A
noun phrase consists of a noun plus modifiers of some
kind, which together can be used in all the syntactic positions in which a single noun can be used: alone to name or
request something, or in a sentence as subject, object, or
predicate nominative. The table at the top gives a number
of noun phrases uttered by Adam or Eve at about two
years of age. Each noun phrase consists of one word from a
small class of modifiers, M, followed by one word from the
large class of nouns, N. The rule for generating these noun
phrases is given below in symbols: NP is generated by M
plus N.
The class M does not correspond to any single syntactic
class in adult English; it includes indefinite and definite
articles, a possessive pronoun, a demonstrative adjective, a
quantifier, a cardinal number, and some descriptive adjec-
tives. In adult English these words are of different syntactic classes because they have very different privileges of
occurrence in sentences. For the children, the words ap-
pear to belong to a single class because of their common
privilege of occurrence before nouns; the lack of distinction leads to ungrammatical combinations, which are
marked in the table by an asterisk. Thus the indefinite article should be used only with a common count noun in the
singular, as in ((a coat"; we do not say ('a celery", "a
9
�Becky", "a hands". The numeral two we use only with
count nouns in the plural; hence we do not say "two sock".
The word "more" we use before mass nouns in the singu~
lar, as in "more coffee", and before count nouns in the plural, as in "more nuts"; we would not say "more nut". To
avoid the errors, it is necessary not only that the privileges
of occurrence of words of the class M be differentiated,
but also that nouns be subdivided into singular and plural,
common and proper, count nouns and mass nouns.
Sixteen weeks after Time I, at Time II, Adam and Eve
were beginning to make some of these differentiations; articles and demonstrative pronouns were now distinguished
from other members of the class M. Articles now always appeared before descriptive or possessive adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns before articles or other modifiers.
Twenty-six weeks after Time I, the privileges of occurrence had become much more finely differentiated. Adam
was distinguishing descriptive adjectives and possessive
pronouns, as well as articles and demonstrative pronouns,
from the residual class M; Eve's classification was even
more complicated, though she was a bit younger. Also,
nouns were being differentiated by both children: proper
nouns were clearly distinct from common nouns; for Eve,
count nouns were distinct from mass nouns.
Simultaneously with these differentiations, further integrations were occurring: the noun phrases were beginning
to occur as constituents in longer sentences; the permissible combinations of modifiers and nouns were assuming
the combination privileges enjoyed by nouns in isolation.
Thus the noun phrase, for Adam and Eve, was coming to
have a psychological unity such as it has for adults. This
was indicated by instances in which a noun phrase was fitted between parts of a separable verb, as in "put the red
hat on". It was also indicated by substitution of pronouns
for noun phrases in sentences, often at first with the pronoun being followed by the noun phrase for which it was
to substitute, as in ((mommy get it my ladder", or ((I miss it
cowboy boot".
Whether any theory of learning at present known can
account for this sequence of differentiations and integrations is doubtful. The process is more reminiscent of the
development of an embryo than it is of the simple acquisition of conditioned reflexes or associations. What is
achieved is an open-ended competence to comprehend
sentences never before heard, in terms of a hierarchical
structure, that embeds structures within structures.
To illustrate, let me use, not a child's sentence, but an
example that Chomsky excerpts from the Port Royal
Grammar of 1660 (see Figure 2). The sentence is: "Invisible God created the visible world". The sentence may be
diagrammed as shown in the figure; Chomsky calls these
diagrams phrase markers. There is a phrase marker for
what he calls surface structure; this has the function of determining the phonetic shape and intonational contour of
the sentence. And there is a phrase marker for what he
calls deep structure; this shows how prior predications are
embedded in the sentence, and determine its meaning.
10
Are formal structures like the one indicated by this diagram really operative when linguistic competence is being
exercised? There are a number of indications that this is
so. One indication is the extent to which the understanding of language involves resolution of ambiguities, or disambiguation as it is sometimes massively put. Consider the
sentence "They are boring students" (see Figure 3). This
has two different interpretations, which are represented
by the diagrams of Figure 3. In interpretation A, the word
((boring" is linked with the word ((students"; the students
are thus characterized as boring. In interpretation B, the
word "boring" is linked with the word "are", which thus
becomes the auxiliary verb in the present progressive
tense of the verb "to bore", it is the students who are being
bored, by certain other persons designated by the pronoun
"they", but otherwise mercifully unidentified. In an actual
conversation, the context of meaning would have led us to
apply, as quick as a thought or perhaps more quickly, the
correct phrase marker to the interpretation of the sequence of uttered sounds.
Other examples show how deep structures are essential
to understanding (see Table VIII). Consider the two sentences:
John is eager to please.
John is easy to please.
These sentences have the same surface structure. But a
moment's thought shows that the word "john" has two
very different roles to play in the two sentences. john in
the first sentence is the person who is doing the pleasing;
in the second sentence he is the person who is being
pleased. John is the underlying subiect in the first case, and
the underlying obiect in the second case. Deep structure
or grammar is involved in understanding the difference in
meaning of the two sentences.
An opposite sort of case occurs when the surface grammars of two sentences are different, although the meaning
is essentially the same. Consider this sentence in the active mode: "Recently seventeen elephants trampled on
my summer home". Now consider the following sentence
in the passive mode: "My summer home was trampled on
recently by seventeen elephants." A native speaker of English feels that these sentences are related, that they have
the same or very similar meanings. Yet their surface structures are very different. Recognition that both sentences
are describing the same event presupposes that speaker
and hearer refer them both to a single deep structure embodying the single meaning. Something similar happens in
recognition of similarity between visual patterns, where
there is no point-to-point correspondence between them.
Now all of this is unlikely to seem astonishing, for it is
very familiar. You and I, like the bourgeois gentilhomme,
have been speaking and listening to more or less grammatical prose for a long time now. People living at the seashore
are said to grow so accustomed to the murmur of the
SUMMER 1983
�waves that they never hear it. Aspects of things that could
be important to us may be hidden by their familiarity. The
point I have been seeking to make is one that is due to
Noam Chomsky, a linguist I have been depending on
more than once this evening. The grammaticality of hu·
man languages involves properties that are in no sense necessary properties of a system that would fulfill the func·
of names automatically. Names, other than proper names,
refer to open and flexible classes, which are subject to ex·
tension and differentiation in the course of language us·
age. Categorization and naming involve relations between
categories; nothing ever resides in a single term; a means
nothing without b and probably c and d; b means nothing
without a and c and d. Children go about assimilating the
tions of human communication. A grammar, for instance,
relations that are embodied in language, not merely imita~
tively, but in an active, inventive, and critical way. They.
in which statements would be generated word-by-word,
from left to right, so to speak, so that any given morpheme
would determine the possible classes of morphemes that
might follow it, is a kind of grammar that might have been
used, but was not. Instead, human speech involves dependencies between non-adjacent elements, as in the sentence "Anyone who says that is lying", where there is a
dependency between the subject noun "anyone" and the
predicate phrase ''is lying". All operations in human languages, transforming, for instance, an active into a passive
sentence, or a declarative into an interrogative sentence,
operate on and take account of phrase structure. Example:
we form the interrogative of the English sentence, "Little
Mary lived in Princeton", by introducing an auxiliary to
the verb ("Little Mary did live in Princeton"), then inverting the order of the auxiliary and the noun-phrase which is
the subject, to get "Did Little Mary live in Princeton?" It
would be entirely possible to form interrogatives in a dif.
ferent way independently of phrase structure. There is no
a priori reason why human languages should make use ex·
elusively of structure-dependent operations. It is Chomsky's conclusion that such reliance on structure-dependent operations must be predetermined for the language
learner by a restrictive initial schematism of some sort,
given genetically, and directing the child's attempts to acquire linguistic competence. Put differently, one does not
so much teach a first language, as provide a thread along
which linguistic competence develops of its own accord,
by processes more like maturation than learning.
The Chomskian analysis requires that we take one more
step. The fact that deep structures figure in the understanding and use of language shows that grammar and
meaning necessarily interpenetrate. The child's grammatical competence matures only along with semantic compe-
tence, the organization of what can be talked about in
nameable categories and hierarchies of categories. This
process, like the development of grammatical compe·
tence, involves successive differentiations. Sensory data
are first grouped into as yet global classes of gross patterns,
and then subsequently differentiated into more specific
patterns. The infant who is given a word such as "daddy",
and has the task of finding the category labelled by this
word, does not start out with the working hypothesis that a
specific, concrete object, say his father, uniquely bears this
name. Rather, the word initially appears to be used as the
label of a general and open category, corresponding to the.
adult category of people or men. Infra-human animals are
taught with difficulty, if at all, to make the generalizations
involved in naming, whereas children fall in with the ways
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
are full of impossible questions:
"How did the sky happen? How did the sun happen? Why is
the moon so much like a lamp? Who makes bugs?"
At first, they are ultra-literal in their reactions to idioms
and metaphors. When grandmother said that winter was
coming soon, the grandchildren laughed and wanted to
know: "Do you mean that winter has legs?" And when a
lady said ''I'm dying to hear that concert", the child's sar·
castic response was, 11 Then why don't you die?" Some~
times reconciliation of adult requirements requires genius.
Chukovsky reports that a four-year-old Muscovite, influenced both by an atheist father and by a grandmother of
orthodox faith, was overheard to tell her playmate: "There
is a god, but, of course, I do not believe in him." The active
analogizing and generalizing of 4- and 5-year olds is dis·
cernible in the odd questions they can put:
"What is a knife-the fork's husband?"
"Isn't it wonderful? I drink milk, water, tea, and cocoa, but
out of me pours only tea."
"What does blue look like from behind?"
For a certain period, there is a special, heightened sensitiv~
ity to the strangeness of words and their meanings; by age
5 or 6 this talent begins to fade, and by 7 or 8 all traces of it
have disappeared. The need has passed; the basic princi·
pies of the child's native language have been mastered.
What is it that has in fact been gained? We say, knowl·
edge of a language. But what is a language, my language?
Thoughtfully considered, this is a well-nigh impossible
question, because a language is not a simple object, existing by itself and capable of being grasped in its totality. It
exists in the linguistic competence of its users; it is what
Aristotle would call an actuality of the second kind, like
the soul, or like knowing how to swim when you are not
swimming. Through it I constitute myself a first-person
singular subject, by using this short word"!", which every·
one uses, and which in each seems to refer to something
different, yet the same. And through it I am brought into
relation with others-the ubiquitous "you" -and with the
public thing that is there for both you and me, a treasury
of knowledge and value transmitted through and embedded in language.
11
�We hear language spoken of as "living language", and
there is evidence enough to make' it more than a metaphor. Language reproduces itself from generation to generation, remaining relatively constant, yet with small mu-
tations, enough in fact to account for its growing and
evolving, leaving vestiges and fossils behind, and undergoing speciation as a result of migrations, like Darwin's
finches on the Galapagos Islands. A change here provokes
an adjustment there, for the whole is a complex of relations, mediating between a world and human organisms
that are a part of it. The way a word is used this year is, in
biological lingo, its phenotype; the deep and more abiding
sense in it is its genotype.
It is we, of course, who are accomplishing all this; but we
do not know how we accomplish it. It is mostly a collective,
autonomic kind of doing, like the building activities of ants
and termites, or the decision-making of bees. It takes generation after generation, but we are part of it whenever
and however we utter words or follow them in the sentences that we hear or read, whether lazily or intently,
whether with habitual acceptance or active inquiry. Always the words are found for us, and fitted with meanings
for us, by agents in the brain over which we exercise no
direct control. We can either float with the stream, sometimes a muddy tide of slang and jargon and cliche, or strug-
virile but, staggeringly, to world, suggesting that man makes
himself and his world.
The dichotomy, the tension, emerges in the The ban cycle of myths (see Table X). Following a suggestion of LeviStrauss, I am listing elements of it in chronological order
from left to right and from the top downward, but in
columns, to show the repetition of similar elements. Cadmus is sent off to seek his sister; he kills a dragon, a
chthonic monster, that will not permit men to live, and
sows the teeth of the dragon in the earth; from the teeth
sprout up armed men who kill one another, all except five
who become the ancestors of the The bans. In column I are
listed events of the myth in which blood relations seem to
be given too much importance. In column II are listed
murders of brothers by brother, of a father by a son: here
blood relations are brutally disregarded. Column I is thus
opposed to column II. In column Ill, chthonic monsters
that were killing off humans are themselves killed by men;
we can interpret this as a denial of the autochthonous origin of man, an assertion that man has now become self-
ering what it is that we mean as we proceed. We "articulate"; the word once meant division into small joints, then,
by an effortless transition, the speaking of sentences.
There are unexpected outcomes. We may find that our ut-
sufficient, himself responsible for his continued existence.
In column IV are listed the meanings of the names of the
Labdacidae, including Oedipus; the etymologies all indicate difficulty in walking or in standing upright. In myths
throughout the world, this difficulty in walking or standing
is characteristic of the creature that has just emerged out
of the earth; the names given in column IV thus constitute
an assertion of the autochthonous origin of man. Column
IV contradicts column III, just as column I contradicts
column II. The myth deals with a difficulty of one sort, not
by resolving it, but by juxtaposing it to another, parallel
type of opposition. Neither man's rootedness in nature nor
terance is ungrammatical or illogical; or we may discover
his transcendence of nature is unproblematic.
that the connection of ideas leads in directions we had not
The study of language and its acquisition by children indicates that our language has genetic foundations or roots.
These, however, have their fruition only under appropriate conditions, only through culture. Man is by nature a
cultural animal. He does not fabricate his linguistic culture
out of whole cloth.
On the one hand, it becomes conceivable that a universal grammar and semantics might be formulated, describing the species-specific features and presuppositions that
characterize human linguistic behavior universally. On
the other hand, nature's gift of language brings with it an
apparent freedom from deterministic necessity not previ-
gle cross stream or upstream. Sometimes we can, sensing
the possible presence of a meaning, attempt a raid on the
inarticulate; we can launch ourselves into speech, discov-
previously considered. In any case, phonetic, syntactical,
and semantic structures are being actualized in time, with-
out our quite knowing how. Yet we can strive after that
lucidity and precision which, when achieved, make language seem transparent to what there is.
I have already been carried beyond the two propositions
I set out to defend, and in doing so, I have moved into a
region of ambiguity. The question as to what is determined by nature, independently of us, and what is manmade, is an ancient and disturbing question, embedded in
old etymologies and myths.
(See Table IX). In more than one language, the word
''man" is derived from ''earth". So it is in Hebrew: Adam,
Hman", comes from the word for "ground". As shown in the
upper diagram, the IndoEuropean root for "earth" gives us
''man" and "human" as well as "humus". The notion here
is that of the autochthonous origin of humans, their origination from the earth itself; it is a notion found in early cultures all over the world. An implication would seem to be
that man is like a plant in his naturalness. On the other
hand, as shown in the lower diagram, the IndoEuropean
root "wiros", "man" or "the strong one", leads not only to
12
ously present. Most of our sentences are quite new; it is
uncommon for one sentence to come out the same as an-
other, though the thoughts be the same. Our utterances
are free of the control of detectable stimuli. The number
of patterns underlying the normal use of language, according to Chomsky, is orders of magnitude greater than the
seconds in a lifetime, and so cannot have been acquired
simply ··by conditioning. While the laws of generation of
sentences remain fixed and invariant, the specific manner
in which they are applied remains unspecified, open to
choice. The application can be appropriate. Articulate,
SUMMER 1983
�structurally organized signals can be raised to an expression of thought.
Achievement here is subject to change and old laws, and
it depends on a sensitivity to old meanings as well as new
'
possibilities. It requires both strength and submission.
./"
/'"
/1
Tidal volume
Time of inspiration
Time of inspiration
+ expiration
500-600cm 3
about 0.4
During Speech
!500-2400cm 3
about 0.13
Breaths per minute
18-20
4-20
Expiration
Continuous &
unimpeded
Periodically interrupted, with
increase in subglottal pressure
Electrical activity
in expiratory
muscles
Nil or very low
Chest & abdom- Mainly chest; slight desynina!, closely syn- chronization between chest
chronized
and abdominal muscles
Airways
Primarily nasal
-..
--.
\
'J
I
\
(
'
I
"\
/
'-J/
?-
I
f
I
\
\
'
I
I
)
I
\
'
"
.....
./
Active in inspira- Active in inspiration & in extion & nil during piration till expiratory muscles
expiration
become active
Musculatures in·
valved
--
J', "\""-
I
I
/
-~-
Nil or very low at start of
phonation; then increases
rapidly and continues active
to end of expiration
Electrical activity
in inspiratory
muscles
/
)
I
Breathing
/'
"\
I
I
(
Respiratory Adaptation in Speech
Quietly
"'-
,.
-
TABLE I
-
Primarily oral
TAIL-WAGGING DANCE
TABLE II
Species-specific Features of Human Speech
1. Phonematization
''Morphemes":
the smallest meaningful units into which an
utterance can be divided.
Examples:
water
spick and span
"er" in "whiter", "taller", etc.
''Phoneme":
the smallest distinctive unit of sound functioning within the sound system of a language to
make a difference.
Examples:
/pi vs. /b/
/t/ vs. /d/
FIGURE 1
I
/
Phonematization: all morphemes in all natural human languages
are divisible into phonemes.
2. Concatenation:
\
single morphemes are strung together into
sequences, rather than being used in isolation.
3. Grammar or
in no human language are morphemes strung
together in purely random order.
Examples (Chomsky):
Grammatical: "colorless green ideas sleep
furiously"
Ungrammatical: "furiously sleep ideas green
colorless"
Syntactical
Structure:
ROUND DANCE
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
13
�TABLE III
TABLEV
Comparative Weights of Brain and Body in Humans,
Including Nanocephalic Dwarf, Chimpanzees,
and Monkeys
Adult Expansions of Child Pronouncements
Age
BodyWt. Brain Wt.
(kg)
(kg)
Human (male)
Human (male)
Human (male)
Nanocephalic
dwarf
2·112
IJ.)/2
18
12
J3.1/2
45
64
13·112
3
adult
12-l/2
47
3-l/2
12.3
34
47
34
yes
yes
yes
yes
34
no
no
no
1.100
1.350
1.350
0.400
Chimp (male)
Chimp (female)
Rhesus monkey
Speech
Acquisition
0.400
0.450
0.090
adult
104
40
Mother's Expansions
(Additions circled)
Baby highchair
Ratio
(Body:
Brain)
Utterances of Child
Baby(is in thCihighchair
Mommy eggnog
Mommy~eggnog
Eve lunch
Eve )is havingjlunch
Mommy sandwich
Mommy\'ll have :1\sandwich
~satlun thdwall
Sat wall
Throw Daddy
Throwlit toiDaddy
Pick glove
Pick~glove@ji]
TABLE IV
TABLE VI
Imitations by Adam and Eve, Two Years of Age
Plural Inflection
Model Utterance (Parent)
Child's Imitation
Tank car
Wait a minute
Tank car
Wait a minute
Daddy's brief case
Fraser will be unhappy
He's going out
That's an old-time train
It's not the same dog as Pepper
No, you can't write on Mr. Cromer's shoe
Daddy brief case
Fraser unhappy
He go out
Old-time train
Dog Pepper
Singular
mouse
foot
vs.
Plural
mouses
foots
or:
feet
man
feets
mans
Write Cromer shoe
Contentives
Nouns: Daddy, Fraser, Pepper, Cromer;
tank car, minute, brief case, train, dog, shoe
Verbs: wait, go, write
Adjectives: unhappy, old-time
Functors:
the
the
the
the
the
the
the
Regularization of irregular forms:
possessive inflection 's
modal auxiliary will
progressive inflection -ing
contraction of the auxiliary verb is
preposition on
articles the and an
modal auxi1iary can
Words ending in sibilants
First Stage:
Possible
Second Stage:
Third Stage:
box (as well as horse, match, judge, etc.) treated as both
singular and plural
bok vs. boks, in analogy with normal "s" pluralization,
replaces box vs. boxes
after box vs. boxes is produced, then we also get foot
vs.footses, hand vs. handses
Past Tense Inflection
-------------corned
----------gocd
go
come----------------------went
came
----------doed
do........______
........______did
14
---------- buyed
buy
------------bought
SUMMER 1983
�TABLE VII
TIME I:
FIGURE 2
Noun Phrases with Generative Rule
A coat
*A celery
That Adam
That knee
More coffee
*More nut
*Two sock
Two shoes
*Two tinker toy
*A Becky
*A hands
The top
My Mommy
My stool
Chomskian Phrase Markers
Big boot
Poor man
SURFACE STRUCTURE
Little top
Dirty knee
Sentence (S)
~
1\
Subject
Predicate
(NAse)
M
a, big, dirty, little, more, my, poor, that, the, two
Adjective
Noun
j
j
Invisible
N Adam, Becky, boot, coat, coffee, knee, man, Mommy, nut, sock,
God
stool, tinker toy, top, etc.
TIME II:
Subdivision of Modifier class with Generative Rules
A. Privileges peculiar to articles
Obtained
A blue flower
*A my pencil
Rule: NP-+Art
+M +N
(Not:
NP~M
Obtained
Not Obtained
*That a horse
*That a blue flower
*Ungrammatical in adult English
+N
the visible world
Sentence (S)
~
Predicate
Subject
~
God
~
S
Verb
Subject
Object
I~
I
Created
j
j
j
God
is
the world
invisible
S
~
Copula Pred. Adj.
Subject
j
the world
Pred. Adj.
Copula
*A that horse
*A that blue flower
*Blue a that flower
Rule: NP- Dem +Art+ M
j
created
+art+ N)
B. Privileges peculiar to demonstrative pronouns
Object
DEEP STRUCTURE
Not obtained
*Blue a flower
*Nice a nap
*Your a car
*My a pencil
A nice cap
*A your car
Verb
/
j
is
j
visible
FIGURE 3
"They are boring Students": Two Interpretations
INTERPRETATION
A
Sentence
~
Predicate
Subject
I
V~~tive
Pronoun
j
They
Copula
j
are
Adjective
j
boring
Noun
j
students
INTERPRETATION B
Sentence
~
Subject
I
Predicate
~ect~
Pronoun
Aux
I
I
They
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
are
Progressive
I
boring
Noun
\
students
15
�TABLE VIII
TABLE IX
Evidence for "Deep" Structure
Some Etymologies
guman
deep structure different:
Surface structures different,
deep structures the same:
{Germanic)
John is eager to please.
Surface structures the same,
[
John is easy to please.
Recently seventeen elephants
trampled on my summer house.
dhghem -------~~--- gumen
(IndoEuropean)
(Old English)
= "earth"
] ="man"
homo, humanitas-- human
(Latin)
(English)
My summer home was recently
[ trampled on by seventeen
elephants.
·
humus
humus
(Latin)
(English)
= "mould", "ground"
Visual patterns recognized as similar,
although no point-to-point correspondence exists between them.
chth6n -----chthonic----autochthonous
(Greek)
(English)
= "from the earth
= ''earth"
= "of the earth"
itself"
v i r - - - - - - - - virile
(Latin)
(English)
.
~="man"
WITOS~
(IndoEuropean)
"man"
~
~;rmanic, Old
~!n?.~~~", ~
"the strong
one"
alt,old~
weorold world
(AngloSaxon) (English)
= "age of man",
"world"
(AngloSaxon)
= "age"
16
SUMMER 1983
�TABLE X
II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
III
Blood rela-
Blood rela-
Chthonic
tions overemphasized
tions underemphasized
monsters that
would not
permit men to
live are slain
by men
IV
Difficulties in
walking
straight and
standing up-
right
Cadmus seeks
his sister
Europa, rav-
ished by Zeus
Cadmus kills
the dragon
The Sparti (the
sown dragon's
teeth) kill one
another
Labdacus
(Laius' father)
="lame"
Oedipus kills his
Laius (Oedipus'
father) ~ "left-
father, Laius
sided"
Oedipus kills
the Sphinx
Oedipus =
"swollen-foot"
Oedipus marries his mother,
Jocasta
Eteocles and
Polyneices,
brothers, kill
one another
Antigone buries
(In the preparation of this lecture I made use of the following books: the book by E. H. Lenneberg, as well as the
book edited by him, was particularly useful.)
Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Coral
Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971.
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, Mass.: M.LT. Press, 1965.
___, Cartesian Linguistics, New York: Harper & Row,
1966.
___ ,Language and Mind, New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and World, 1968.
David Crystal, Linguistics, Penguin, 1971.
Karl von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of
Bees, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard,
1967.
Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances,
New York, 1948.
E. H. Lenneberg, The Biological Foundations for Language, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967.
E. H. Lenneberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language, Cambridge, Mass.: M.LT. Press, 1966.
Martin Lindauer, Communication Among Social Bees,
New Yark: Atheneum, 1967.
john Lyons, Noam Chomsky, New Yark: Viking Press,
1970.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed.
Bally & Sechehaye; tr. Baskin; New York, 1959.
B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1957.
her brother,
Polyneices, de-
spite prohibition
Column I : Column II : : Column IV : Column III
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
17
�SOLSTICE ON THE
FIRST WATCH
There is no magic. What we perceive
as lightning wending its electric way
along the surface of the skin
is only the silent, whispered dance
of chemicals and electric fields
that move like ocean waves through us
in our private sea.
Then those lights in the sky,
translucent curtains of fire
ice-green and red, resolve themselves
when we focus as abstractions
of the abstract impulse of nerve
on nerve in mindless dark.
Yet these movements sometimes
overwhelm our doubts with a heat,
shimmering in the way that light
walks on the surface of water
like the original solstice did,
When the doubting soldiers saw
something move with the dim hours
of the first watch along the edge
of the sea, then out on it, a figure
of a singular man walking, the image
Of water touching the feet. Rumours
floated lightly on the tongue and words
took root that something happened.
What they held as true was true,
But the nets of words cast along
some shore of meaning circumscribed,
And the road from there
leading into the endless stars
and the mountains
cast us into a land
not quite our own.
J.
H. BEALL
James H. Beall is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md.
18
SUMMER 1983
�The Ground of Nature:
Shakespeare, Language, and Politics
Paul A. Cantor
I
In recent years, several critics, myself included, have
been 'trying to call attention to the importance of politics
as a subject in Shakespeare's plays. 1 This attempt to expand the scope of Shakespeare criticism has met with
considerable resistance, Sceptics have argued that
Shakespeare was not at all interested in politics, he was interested only in character or psychology, or in presenting
certain religious beliefs, or in developing a tragic worldview, and so on, Generally the counterarguments have
taken the form: "Shakespeare was not interested in politics, he was interested in X," where X is some subject
thought of as excluding political concerns. But most recently a new challenge to a political approach to Shakespeare has begun to loom on the horizon. Instead of offering an alternative subject as the focus of Shakespeare's
interest, this approach denies that his plays are about anything at all, that is, about anything other than themselves.
Remaking Shakespeare on the model of twentieth-century
literature, this approach views his works as fundamentally
self-reflexive, not attempting to represent anything in the
real world but instead calling attention to their own fictiveness as works of art. According to this view, any attempt to
study politics as a subject in Shakespeare would be hopelessly naive, based as it is on an antiquated and outmoded
mimetic theory of art.
I am referring of course to the most fashionable of current schools of literary criticism, deconstruction. OrigiPaul Cantor is a member of the English faculty at the University of Virginia. His new book, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism, will be published by Cambridge University Press in March
1984.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nally applied primarily to nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature, this form of analysis is gradually being
extended to the interpretation of all historical periods,
including the Renaissance, According to this view,
Shakespeare's plays are written in language, and language
is a self-contained system, an endless play of signifiers,
Hence if Shakespeare's plays are about anything, they are
about language itself. As J- Hillis Miller writes of literature
in general:
If meaning in language rises not from the reference of signs to
something outside words but from differential relations
among words themselves, ... then the notion of a literary
text which is validated by its one-to-one correspondence to
some social, historical, or psychological reality can no longer
be taken for granted. No language is purely mimetic or referential, not even the most utilitarian speech. The specifically
literary form oflanguage, however, may be defined as a structure of words which in one way or another calls attention to
this fact, while at the same time allowing for its own inevitable misreading as a "mirroring of reality." 2
From the point of view of deconstruction, then, a political
reading of Shakespeare can only be a misreading. The
plays have no political meaning; indeed they have no determinate meaning at alL All the details that might cause
us to wonder-inconsistencies, contradictions, seeming
errors that call out for analysis to uncover some deeper significance-all these puzzling aspects of the plays merely
work to keep us from coming up with a coherent and univocal interpretation and thereby to preserve the work's indeterminacy of meaning.
Miller, for example, has written an elaborate analysis of
what most scholars have been content to dismiss as a
printer's error in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: the
19
�appearance of the name Ariachne in one of Troilus'
speeches, which seems to be a conflation of two names
from Greek mythology, Ariadne and Arachne. The intrusive i provokes Miller into a frenzied fantasia of epistemological speculation:
Slip of the tongue or of the pen? Ignorance on Shakespeare's
part? Error of the scribe or of the typesetter who has put in
one letter too many? The extra i ... produce[s} a gap in the
meaning and call[s] attention to the material base of signs,
marks on the page which the eye interprets . ... The little i in
"Ariachnes" has the effect of a bit of sand in a salad or of a
random sound in a symphony, the flautist dropping his flute,
the snap of a breaking violin string. . . . The conflation in
"Ariachnes" of two myths which are and are not congruent is
precisely in agreement with what happens in Troilus' speech,
namely, an anguished confrontation with the subversive possibility of dialogue, reason divided hopelessly against itself . ... The principle of identity is the basic assumption of
monological metaphysics . ... The "whole shebang" of Occidental metaphysics is, the reader can see, brought into question in Troilus' experience and in his speech. 3
By the time Miller has finished deconstructing, the unity
of Shakespeare himself has disintegrated:
One ofthe certainties which dissolves with the undecidability
of context ... is the concept of authorizing authorship, or
indeed of selfhood generally in the sense of an ultimate generative source for any act of language. There is not any "Shakespeare himself." "Shakespeare" is an effect of the text, which
depersonalizes, disunifies . ... The works of Shakespeare are
so comprehensive and so profound an exploration of the possibilities inherent in the English language as it inherits the
concepts, figures, and stories of Occidental culture, that it
seems they must have been written by a committee of geniuses.4
Faced with the dissolution of Shakespeare himself, we can
hardly find time to mourn the loss of the mere meaning of
his plays.
One hopes that Miller is being playful in this particular
essay, turning in a virtuoso performance as he makes an
epistemological mountain out of a textual molehill. But
however playful the deconstructive approach to Shakespeare may be, it will have serious and lasting consequences if it succeeds in diverting us from the genuinely
challenging task of thinking through the authentic problems in Shakespeare's texts. We have not yet been flooded
with articles and books deconstructing Shakespeare, but
one senses that it is only a matter of time. To try to ward
off the damage that might be done we might consider
whether Shakespeare himself offers any thoughts on the
nature of language, thoughts which might well prove to be
a better guide to his plays than those of contemporary critics. Unfortunately, we have no theoretical writings of
Shakespeare to which we might refer to establish his own
view oflanguage or ofliterary meaning. When one turns to
the plays for a clue, one finds statements of precisely the
20
mimetic theory of art which contemporary critics despise.
Consider, for example, Hamlet's famous advice to the
players:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of na·
ture: for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as
'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure. 5
Hamlet's invocation of nature as a standard, his naive faith
that theatre has a purpose, his conventional use of the mirror metaphor for art, above all his idea that art must serve a
moral function, all of these attitudes would suggest to con·
temporary critics that Hamlet should have dropped out of
school at Wittenberg and headed off immediately with
Laertes to study in Paris. But we can never simply identify
Shakespeare with any of his characters, and thus even if
Hamlet may be an unreconstructed realist, we can say
nothing about the epistemology of his author.
Does language itself ever become thematic in Shakespeare? Normally his language seems transparent: we look
through the characters' words to what they are talking
about. But is there any place in which Shakespeare's language calls attention to itself, not as all great poetic language does through its beauty, but simply as language as
such? For language itself to become an object of our attention, it must get in our way, we must stumble over it on our
way to the things it normally represents. I will argue that
the most self-conscious use of language in Shakespeare is
to be found in one of his most political plays, Henry V.
What I have in mind is Act Ill, scene iv, of this play, the
central scene of its central act, a conversation between the
French princess Katherine and an old gentlewoman
named Alice. In one of the most peculiar scenes in all of
Shakespeare, we suddenly bump into the brute fact oflanguage. The scene is almost entirely in French. As such, it
violates one of the most basic linguistic conventions of
drama. When portraying foreigners on stage, dramatists
take the liberty of having them speak, not their native language, but the language of the play's audience. There are,
of course, variations of this convention. Sometimes more
or less awkward devices are used to supply translations.
But basically, even in today's science fiction films, Americans can timewarp to distant galaxies and still find twoheaded green insects speaking fluent twentieth-century
English. Even within Henry V, Shakespeare normally follows this convention of having aliens speak our language.
Act Ill, scene vii, takes place entirely among Frenchmen
and yet the conversation is conducted solely in flawless
English. We are in fact so accustomed to this dramatic
convention that we are hardly aware of its oddness.
If there is any scene in all of Shakespeare which calls
attention to the artificiality of dramatic representation, it
is, then, Act Ill, scene iv, of Henry V. By violating one of
SUMMER 1983
�the basic conventions of drama, it reminds us of how conventional drama is. Suddenly shopked by hearing the
French people we see on stage actually speakmg French,
we ought to reflect on how all our lives we have unthinkingly accepted foreigners speaking English in the theatre.
If that is not enough to qualify as a self-conscious use of
language, this scene is itself a little language lesson.
Katherine is trying to learn English from Alice, who has
been in England and can instruct the French princess in a
vocabulary she may soon need to know. In fact, this is the
only reason Shakespeare can get away with presenting an
entire scene in French. Katherine keeps pointing to vari~
ous parts of her body and asking Alice what they are called
in English. It should take an audience only a few moments
to catch on to what is transpiring, and indeed this scene
plays quite well in the theatre_ The basic trick is fairly obvious and the fact that Alice does manage to get out the
names for the various body parts in her broken English ensures that even the densest audience will not get lost.
Still, it is worth noting that in the one scene in which
Shakespeare most clearly calls attention to language as
such, he specifically calls attention to its referential aspect.
Act III, scene iv, works only because language is not a selfcontained system, but makes reference to an external
world. The naively mimetic act of pointing is at the center
of this scene. Shakespeare even seems to dwell on the one
quality of language most disputed by contemporary theorists: its translatibility. His characters make an easy transition from French to English because both languages refer
to the same world of nature. The entire language lesson
revolves around something quite ordinary and natural: the
parts of the human body. The point seems to be that the
body provides a natural common ground for human understanding. All human beings have basically the same
bodies: thus on the level of the body they can discourse
with one another smoothly, even moving from one set of
conventional names to another without misunderstandmg.
But Katherine's English lesson does not come off completely without a hitch. When she goes to learn the English word chin, she mispronounces it sin, and when she
hears Alice say the English words foot and gown, she mistakes them for two indecent words in French, in fact the
French equivalents of the two prime four-letter words in
English. Shakespeare evidently has no illusions about the
complete translatability of one language into another.
When one moves beyond the basic level of the body to
moral significances, things very quickly become more
complicated. Chin becomes sin: what is perfectly ordinary
and natural in one language can become distorted into
something objectionable in another. One language's propriety can become another language's profanity, as happens with Katherine's misunderstanding of the word
gown. Here what does the covering in English becomes in
French what is supposed to be covered up. The seen becomes the obscene.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
II
If my reading is correct, one may still wonder: what is a
scene about language doing in the middle of one of
Shakespeare's history plays? Henry Vis a play about a great
English monarch who tried to conquer France- With Act
III, scene iv, Shakespeare subtly suggests that the problem
of conquering France is ultimately a problem of language.
Henry wishes to unite the English and the French nations,
but considering the fact that they do not speak the same
language, that is not going to be an easy task_ On a very
low level-the level of the body-English and French do
translate easily into each other. That suggests that the English and the French could be united only on the basis of
the material concerns which all human beings share, the
concerns they all have by virtue of having the same bodies.
In Act III, scene iv, Katherine terminates her language lesson by saying (in French): "That's enough for one time;
let's go to dinner" (III.iv-61-62)- She turns quickly from
the strain of her intellectual pursuits to an activity which
can satisfy her body's needs rather than her mind's. As we
see, when Katherine tries to learn another language, her
enquiries center around the body and its basic needs: food,
clothing, sex. Languages translate easily into one another
only when they remain on the level of the lowest common
denominator of human needs. When Katherine moves beyond purely material concerns, and touches upon issues
like the profanity of language, blunders start to creep into
her translations. Human beings evidently are not as easily
united in their spiritual concerns as they are in their material.
Thus Act III, scene iv, portrays comically a very serious
problem facing Henry V_ In many respects, all men do categorize the world the same way, and the different names
they attach to things do not lead to misunderstandings_
But when men divide the world into categories which embody evaluations, such as the decent and the indecent or
the sacred and the profane, they often differ fundamentally as to where they draw the line. When Ancient Pistol
has a French soldier at his mercy, the frightened man calls
upon his deity: "0 Seigneur Dieu!" But Pistol thinks that
his opponent has merely introduced himself: "0 Signieur
Dew should be a gentleman" (IV_iv.6-7)_ Pistol unintentionally secularizes the French Dieu into the English Dew_
Once again, this seems to be merely a comic error, but it
does point to a deeper problem: the French and English
worship different gods. To be sure, on the surface they
share a common Christianity, but Shakespeare has gone
out of his way to differentiate the two regimes, even in
terms of their beliefs. The god of Henry V turns out to be a
"God of battles" (IV.i.289), providing him with the basis
for leading his citizen army into war. Judging by Act III,
scene vii, what the French worship is their horses and
their mistresses, and in precisely that order (IILvii.39-44).
The French in Henry V put their faith in chivalry, which
helps to explain why they are defeated by the more practi-
21
�cal and down-to-earth English. The misunderstandings
which occur when the French and English try to speak to
each other in Henry V are not merely the result of ignorance of each others' languages, for their languages embody basic disagreements in their values and beliefs.
These disagreements may well be what makes one people distinct from another, what gives them their national
character, and as such they are political disagreements. To
unite the French and the English, Henry V would thus
have to disregard everything that makes the French
French and the English English, in short everything
that makes either nation interesting as a people. When
Shakespeare finally shows Henry trying to unite the two
kingdoms in Act V, he presents the task concretely as a
problem of language. Henry must woo Katherine to be his
queen, and that requires learning her language: "It is as
easy for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so
much more French. I shall never move thee in French, unless it be to laugh at me" (V.ii.l84-87). The dialogue between the English king and the French princess does take
many comic turns because of the potential for misunderstanding as they grope for a linguistic common ground:
K. Hen. Fair Katherine, and most fair,
Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms,
Such as will enter at a lady's ear,
And plead his love-suit to her gentle heart?
Kath. Your Majesty shall mock at me, I cannot speak your
England.
K. Hen.
0 fair Katherine, if you will love me soundly with
your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue. Do you like me, Kate?
Kath. Pardonnez-moi, I cannot tell wat is "like me."
K. Hen. An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel.
[V.ii.98-ll0]
The result of this effort to span the two nations is a kind
of pidgin English and a pidgin French. Two of the richest
and most complex of languages must be radically reduced
and simplified for communication to take place between
Henry and Katherine. It is certainly unusual for Shakespeare to present a romantic dialogue between a king and
a future queen entirely in prose. And yet Shakespeare evidently realized that it is precisely the poetry of love that
would not survive the effort to move between two languages. Henry is a very prosaic suitor:
Henry is obviously no Romeo, and in wooing his Juliet his
linguistic resources seem meager indeed. And his love suit
ultimately elicits a kind of bastardized blend of English
and French:
K. Hen. Come, your answer in broken music; for thy voice is
music and thy English is broken; therefore, queen of all,
Katherine, break thy mind to me in broken English-wilt
thou have me?
Kath. Dat is as it shall please de roi mon pere.
[V.ii.243-47]
We see here in linguistic terms the futility of Henry's effort to bring France and England together. Henry is overreaching himself. He hopes for some kind of grand synthesis of England and France that will enable his dynasty to
conquer the world:
Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George,
compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to
Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?
[V.ii.206-209]
But the practical result of Henry's efforts would be a bland
mixture of French and English characteristics, reduced to
the lowest common denominator and hence losing sight of
all the higher ideals of either nation. Even if Henry's early
death had not destroyed his hopes, Shakespeare suggests
that there was a basic flaw in Henry's plan for producing a
superkingdom out of two linguistically distinct nations.
Henry's experience in his own country should have
taught him the difficulties of spanning a linguistic gulf.
One measure of Henry's legitimate achievement is that
Shakespeare presents him as the king, not just of England,
but of Great Britain. One of the keys to his military success is that he is able to lead not just Englishmen against
the French, but Irish, Welsh, and Scottish troops as well,
soldiers from remote corners of his realm who seem to
have an almost pagan fierceness that gives the British
army its strength in battle. But the mixture of men Henry
leads is not wholly harmonious. They do not always speak
the same language, or at least they do not always speak it
with the same accent. This often leads to tension among
the troops. In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare suggests
the potential for disharmony among the nationalities that
go to make up Great Britain, and presents the problem in
terms of language. The rebel conspiracy almost falls apart
as the Englishman Hotspur and theW elshman Glen dower
question each other's linguistic competence:
I' faith, Kate, my wooing is fit for thy understanding. I am
glad thou canst speak no better English, for if thou couldst,
thou wouldst find me such a plain king that thou wouldst
think I had sold my farm to buy my crown. I know no ways to
mince it in love, but directly to say "I love you" . ... Marry, if
you would put me to verses ... Kate, why you undid me . ...
I speak to thee plain soldier. If thou canst love me for this,
take me! if not, to say to thee that I shall die, is true; but for
thy love, by the Lord, no; yet I love thee too.
[V.ii.l22-27, 132-33, 149-52]
22
Hot.
Let me understand you then,
Speak it in Welsh.
Glend. I can speak English, lord, as well as you,
For I was train'd up in the English court,
Where being but young I framed to the harp
Many an English ditty lovely well,
And gave the tongue a helpful ornament,
A virtue that was never seen in you.
[Ill.i.ll7-l24]
SUMMER 1983
�As Glendower shows, the non-English members of the
British nation are very sensitive to the charge that they do
not know the English language, and feel constrained to
point out that they can in fact use it better than a native
speaker.
The same issue comes up in Henry V, in a scene in
which an Irishman, a Welshman, and a Scotsman quarrel
over the conduct of the wars in France. The Irishman will
not abide any ethnic slurs from a Welshman:
Fluellen. Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your
correction, there is not many of your nationMacmorris. Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain,
and a basterd, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?
[III.ii.l20-24]
One of the political lessons of Henry V is that all the nationalities that go to make up Great Britain must learn to
put aside their linguistic differences and to recognize their
common interest. This is certainly the point of the humiliation of the Englishman, Ancient Pistol, at the hands of
the Welshman, Fluellen:
You thoUght, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel.
You find it otherwise, and henceforth let a Welsh correction
teach you a good English condition.
[V.i.75-79]
Henry encourages this kind of linguistic peace among his
subjects. One aspect of his genius as a monarch is the way
he generally understands the connection between language and politics. He has made sure that he can speak the
language of all his people, and this ability stands him in
good stead when he needs to lead them in wartime. He can
deal with his troops on a man-to-man basis:
For forth he goes, and visits all his host,
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile,
And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen.
[IY.Cho.32-34]
Even as Prince Hal, Henry understood the importance
of language to a king. One of the reasons he offers for his
truancy from court is his desire to get out among his people and learn how they speak:
I have sounded the very base-string of humility. Sirrah, I am
sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can call them all by
their christen names, as Tom, Dick, and Francis . ... They
call drinking deep, dyeing scarlet, and when you breathe in
your watering, they cry "hem!" and bid you play it off. To
conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour,
that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during
my life.
[II.iv.5-8, 15-20]
It may seem strange to hear a future king priding himself
on his knowledge of London slang. But Hal puts this
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knowledge to good use once he becomes Henry V. He
might not have overestimated his ability to absorb France
into his kingdom if he had realized the implications of the
fact that he lacks such familiarity with the slang of the
Paris underworld. Henry has a difficult enough time making one nation out of people who speak the same language
with different accents. But to create one nation out of
men who do not even speak the same language is beyond
even Henry's political skill.
III
At first sight, Henry V seems to deal exclusively with political and military subject matter. But as we have seen,
language as a theme is surprisingly pervasive in the play.
The reason of course is that language itself turns out to be
a political theme. As Shakespeare shows in Act III, scene
iv, though language provides a natural common ground for
human beings, it also tends to reflect the conventional differences which separate them, differences rooted in the
different regimes under which they Jive and hence political differences. Language thus becomes a political problem, and any effective leader like Henry V must learn to
use language as a political tool. Falstaff's great contribution to Henry's education is to teach him the art of rhetoric, how to bend language to achieve a desired effect.
Henry V opens with the English court using all their linguistic skill to fabricate a pretext for invading France. By
an artful interpretation of the French Salic law, the English establish Henry's claim to the French throne. Still, language is not totally pliant, even in the hands of a master
rhetorician such as Henry V. Thus ultimately language
sets limits to politics, or at least one may say that a political
man can ignore linguistic problems only at the peril of his
political achievement.
If one asks why of all Shakespeare's plays, Henry V displays the greatest self-consciousness about language, the
answer seems to be that only in an environment of competing languages does one begin to notice the importance
oflanguage as such. With the clash of English and French,
or even the rivalry of various dialects of English within the
British nation, one starts to grasp the distinction between
nature and convention in language. As Act III, scene iv,
suggests, there could be no communication among human
beings if language were not somehow rooted in the world
of nature. Reference to the substratum of nature is what
makes possible translation from one language to another.
But free and perfect translation is not always possible, because language is not simply natural to man, the way animal cries are innate and species-specific. Men have to create their languages for themselves, and in the process end
up introducing conventional distinctions into their language systems. Unlike other beings we know, humans use
their languages to dispute; their languages convey not just
information and emotion, but opinion. Shakespeare seems
to set up Act Ill, scene iv, to move between the natural
23
�and conventional poles. of language. We travel from the
simplest act of naming things in nature to the complex cultural reaction of shame and indignation. As we see, m a
given language, the name for a perfectly natural bodily
function or organ can in fact become an obscenity.
Perhaps more than any other, the category of the obscene reveals what is distinctive about human language,
because it shows the link between language and social
mores. Good language can become a matter of good manners. Princess Katherine's reaction tu what she hears as
the prime curse words of her language shows her to be a
proper and well-bred child of her culture: "0 Lord, those
are bad words,, wicked, coarse, and immodest, and not
proper for ladies of honor to use. I wouldn't utter those
words before French gentlemen for all the world"
(IJJ.iv.52-56). For Katherine, the words are unacceptable
in French society, but English society is evidently another
matter and she goes on to repeat them as she reviews her
whole lesson. She derives her sense of linguistic propriety
from her own regime, and., strangely enough, her modesty
seems to cease at its borders. In general, human language
is bound up with human sociability. Men would not create
languages if they were not social beings and they constitute themselves as societies in part through !helf languages, embodying whatever is distinctive in the way they
view their world in the way they carve it up into linguistic
categories. That is why language is ultimately a political
phenomenon, and even something over which men might
go to war. 6
We obviously cannot expect to have exhausted the relation of politics and language in Shakespeare by examining
one scene or even one play. Still, I hope I have done
enough to suggest that in his view of language, Shakespeare is closer to Aristotle than to jacques Derrida. In
fact, the connection I have been trying to make between
language and politics is adumbrated by Aristotle in his Politics, when he establishes that political life is natural to
man l>y pointing to the fact of human speech:
Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any
other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say,
makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she
has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice
is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found
in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of
pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another,
and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth
24
the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the
just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he
alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and
the like, and the association of living beings who have this
sense makes a. family and a polisJ
Act III, scene iv, of Henry V calls attention to just this political aspect of language, the way it reflects the conventional distinctions which are the heart of a given polis or
regime. The fact that Shakespeare sets the one scene of
his which is most self-conscious about language in a larger
political context suggests that he shares Aristotle's view of
the bond between the fact that men are political animals
and the fact that tfuey speak the kind of languages they do.
Thus if anyone were to question a political approach to
Shakespeare by claiming that his plays are not about pohtics but about language, I think we could comfortably answer solely on the basis of Henry V: if Shakespeare's plays
are about language, then they are still about politics, because for Shakespeare language itself is political in nature.
At the very least, I hope I have shown that no abstract theory of language, least of all one which views language as a
self-contained or self-referential system, can serve for understanding Shakespeare's plays. Even when Shakespeare
calls attention to language as language, he does so in a living human context, one in which language plays a fundamental role in the complex interaction of man, society,
and the world of nature.
1. See, for example, the pioneering work by Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa,
Shahespeare's Politics, New York: Basic Books, 1964. See aJso II_lY Shahespeare's R'ome: Republic and Empire, Ithaca: Cornell Umvers1ty Press,
1976 and the collection of essays edited by John Alvis and Thomas West,
Shakespeare as Political Thinker, Durham: Carolina Academic Press,
1981.
2. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dichens and Georg~ Cru_ihshank, ~os ~ngeles:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Umvers1ty of Cahforma, 1971,
pp. 1-2.
.
.
3. J. Hillis Miller, "Ariachne's Broken Woof," Georgw Rev~ew, 31, 1977,
pp. 45-47.
4. Miller, "Ariachne's Broken Woof," p. 59.
5. III.ii.17-24. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1974.
6. On the connection between war and language, see All's Well That
Ends Well, IV.i, where the enemy is seen as the barbarian, the man who
does not speak an intelligible language.
. .
.
7. Politics, 1253a7-20. Quoted in the translation of BenJamm Jowett m
Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York: Random
House, 1941, p. 1129.
SUMMER 1983
�Nominal Autobiography
in Shakespeare's Sanne ts
Margreta de Grazia
Once upon a time, in the last decade 0f the eighteenth
century, there lived a reportedly lackluster young man,
named William-Henry Ireland, who repeatedly heard his
father say that he would' give half his substantial library for
the possession of a single signature by Shakespeare_ Eager
to please· his father, William-Henry began leafing through
16th century papers and documents but he could not, alas,
locate a Shakespeare signature. He consequently did the
next best thing: he made one himself He took a facsimile of
one of Shakespeare's signatures from a contemporary edition of Shakespeare and set about reproducing it on old
parchment with an ink concocted of three fluids which,
when held a few seconds before the fire, dried to look a
venerable 200 years old_
Thus begins the story of the most famous of Shakespearean forgers, who, incidentally, fired by this initial success,
when on to produce, or rather fraudulently reproduce,
promissory notes, a profession of faith, love verses to Anne
Hathaway, and most impressive of all a manuscript of
the complete King Lear-all in Shakespeare's own hand.
There is much of interest in this account: the dull youth's
pathetic need to impress his overbearing father, the eager
gullibility ofsuch eminent men of letters as Tames Boswell,
who kissed the forgeries and counted himself blessed to
have lived long enough to see them, and the bardolatry that
even today makes the William-Henry Ireland forgeries-almost as valuable as the Shakespearean originals would have
been-had they existed_ What is of interest to me here,
however, is only one particular of this account: the importance conferred upon Shakespeare's signature; the desire
Margreta de Grazia· received her doctorate from Princeton University
and teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania. Last year she was
a Fellow at the National Humanities Center working on her forthcoming
book on language, selfhood, and Shakespeare's Sonnets before and after
the eighteenth century.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to possess Shakespeare's name written out in his own hand.
Why should Shakespeare's signature be relevant to a discussion of Shakespeare's autobiography? The answer is
quite simple: a signature is a form of self-representation, a
way of making oneself present in writing. So too is autobiography. Signatures and autobiographies are each forms of
writing in the first person. Curiously enough, the prizing of
signatures coincides with the emergence of the term autobiography: both take place in the decades around 1800.
(The OED credits Southey with the first use of the term in
English in 1809), When the way in which a man writes his
name (his signature) changes, so too does the way in which
he writes about himself (his autobiography). As I hope to
indicate, the way in which a man writes his name changes
after the sixteenth century and that change becomes visible by the end of the eighteenth century when Shakespeare's signature becomes a precious collector's item. And
the way a man writes about his life changes no less radically
after the sixteenth century as I hope to show in my discussion of the only work we have by Shakespeare written in
the first person: his Sonnets.
Shakespeare would have been utterly baffled by the coveting of his signature, the coveting that drove WilliamHenry into literary fraud. There is no evidence that Elizabethans were interested in signatures except for the
practical purpose of identifying oneself as the writer of a
message or of contracting oneself to the terms of a legal
document Independent of the letter or document on
which it appeared, independent of its personal, official, or
legal context, a signature had no importance. A signature
alone on a blank piece of paper would have been meaningless and worthless, no matter how illustrious the signator.
In fact, the name signed was not even necessarily written
by the bearer of the name. It was apparently common prac-
tice for one man to sign for another without acknowledging
the substitution. Secretaries, for example, often signed the
25
�names of their employers on both personal letters and official documents. Walsingham's secretary did, so did Lord
Grey's; a secretary signed Essex's name on confidential letters to the Queen. Nor were signatures on legal transactions necessarily authentic. A clerk taking down or copying
a deposition might himself sign it with the name of the
deponent. A witness to the making of a will might himself
sign it. in the name of the testator, without indicating that
he had done so. A man's signature then was not exclusively
in his own hand in the sixteenth century. In this respect, it
was transferrable, like that other mark by which a man of
means might identify himself: the signet or seal, the wax
impressed with an emblem or device. As Hamlet deftly illustrates when he affixes the royal seal to the orders for the
execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, one need not
be the owner of a seal to use it; so too, one did not need to
be the possessor of a signature in order to sign it.
Not only is there little concern about who signs one's
signature; there is also little concern about the style in
which it is signed. The several sixteenth century writing
manuals we possess, like Peter Bales' Writing Schoolmaster,
for example, and John Davies of Hereford's The Anatomy
ofFair Writing, give no special instructions on the writing
of signatures. In the forming and connecting of letters, a
writer has the same freedom in signing his name as he does
in writing anything. It is this freedom that makes it virtually
impossible for experts to attribute a work to an author on
the basis of paleographic evidence alone: attesting to the
difficulty is the controversy still raging after one hundred
years (among paleographers and editors, at least) over the
identification of the hands in the manuscript of the Play of
Sir Thomas More. A writer may use any of the six or seven
hands that writing masters of the period identify (Secretary, Bastard Secretary, Exchequer, set hand of the Chancery, etc.) or a combination of any of them.lt is not unusual
for the same writer to switch from one style to another in
the same manuscript, sometimes changing hands in midsentence, and then sign his name in still another, or tore-
vert to one of the hands he has already employed. The
same diversity that characterizes a writer's manuscript
then, characterizes his signature. To add to the diversity,
the spelling of his name regularly varies, often quite widely.
We have only six authenticated signatures by Shakespeare,
all taken from the last four years of his life, so we do not
know how many of the eighty-three documented variants
ture? How would it be recognized if it had no distinct form?
Would every variation be considered a signature so that a
man would have numerous signatures? What then would
constitute a forgery?
There may be only one signature that conforms to our
assumptions of what a signature is: Queen Elizabeth's.
Elizabeth's signature possesses the uniformity of spelling
and handwriting that we require. In each of the abundant
samples of her signature that we possess, the orthography
and calligraphy are stable from the time she ascended the
throne as a young woman to her dying day at the age of
seventy. In fact, it may be that in this period the word signature could only be properly applied to her signed name or
its official surrogates. All the instances I have seen indicate
that the word referred exclusively to the Queen's signature
or else to that of her notaries whom she authorized to extend her written power.
How are we to understand the Queen's possession of an
exceptionally stable signature in an age when signatures
were commonly unstable? I do not believe we should take
this to mean that only Elizabeth had a definite sense of self,
that only she was sufficiently conscious of her identity to
record and circulate it in a uniform and recognizable signa-
ture. I think a consideration of the problem might involve
determining in what respect Queen Elizabeth was different from her subjects. Perhaps it was not that she had a
more distinct sense of self but that she was a different kind
of self altogether. And indeed such a singular self was attributed to her by that very principle she referred to in ascending to the throne, the principle of the "King's Two
Bodies": "I am but one body, naturally considered," she
declared, "though by [God's] permission a Body Politic
also." Accordingly, Elizabeth had two selves, two bodies,
one natural and ephemeral like that of any person, the
other politic and continuing like that of no other person.
Perhaps it is in that unique capacity, as an embodiment of
state and church, that Elizabeth possessed a fixed signature. It would have reflected, then, not a distinct and individuated self, but rather a secular and religious corporation. Her signature was not a projection of selfhood, but
rather an extension of the power and authority invested in
her by her monarchal position, by her crown. When her
representatives signed their names on official documents,
their signatures took on like stability and uniformity. When
acting as Elizabeth's surrogates or delegates, as appendages
on his last name he used. The six we possess are written in
of her corporation or body politic, as it were, their names
six different scripts and in six different spellings, even
though three of them appear on the same document, the
document that is probably the most important a man signs
assumed the fixity of her own. This might explain what
in his lifetime: his will. Because the signatures are so varied
authenticity of even the authenticated signatures. If a
Queen's Privy Council, sign their names uniformly on
state papers but on their own personal correspondence
vary their signatures considerably.
To summarize, signatures in Shakespeare's time were
name may be signed an indefinite number of ways, what is
with one regal exception and attendant special cases not
to be used as the standard of authenticity? If a signature has
necessarily written in one's own hand and not orthograph-
no consistently recurring form, can it even be called a signa-
ically or paleographically consistent. The signator had no
in form and because Elizabethans did not necessarily sign
their own names, some paleographers have questioned the
26
appears a most curious phenomenon: that such statesmen
as Egerton, Cecil, and Walsingham, all members of the
SUMMER 1983
�inviolable personal or legal relation to his signature. His
signature had no fixed form making,possible its identifica·
tion with one particular individual. I think we would have
to say that in our sense of the word, 'there were no signa·
tures in Renaissance England. Names were written out,
sometimes by their bearer and sometimes not, and typi·
cally without respect to uniformity. They had a function
certainly, as when affixed to the bottom of a letter or on a
legal document, but no value apart from that supplied by
the context in which they appeared.
How then has it come about that a mere scrap of paper
with nothing on it except for Shakespeare's signature is
worth a fortune? (Even a spurious or doubtful signature
was estimated at a million dollars in 1971.) To answer that
would involve a consideration of a complex network of
eighteenth century developments that would include the
standardization of language, the rise of private bank ac·
counts, and the institution of laws governing copyrights
and power of attorney. More centrally, it would involve a
description of a changed notion of the self-of individuality, personality, and character, all three concepts which ac·
quire their present emphasis in the late eighteenth century. I will not pursue this matter here; but in passing let
me offer one or two observations which I think are illuminating. The eighteenth century began to posit and assume
a new relation between the signature and the signator. At
the same time that William-Henry Ireland risked simulating a Shakespearean signature, signatures of various men
of note started to be prized and collected. It is then that
the word autograph is used no longer exclusively to refer to
writing in one's own hand (a manuscript) but is used primarily to distinguish the writing of one's own name. And
of course, we in this country have no trouble recol1ecting
when its revolutionary synonym fohn Hancock became
to read them as autobiography. The nineteenth century
avoided reading them as such in order to avoid the disheartening conclusion that the greatest poet of the language was, by his own admission, an adulterer, sodomite,
and perjuror, that he was, as one Victorian critic chastely
put it, "not immaculate." A wide range of nineteenth century approaches to the Sonnets might be seen as moves to
clear Shakespeare of such charges. The Sonnets were writ-
ten not by Shakespeare but by another; or else only partly
written by Shakespeare (the offensive ones assigned to
other poets) or if written entirely by Shakespeare then
written on behalf of friends or clients, or if written on his
own behalf then not as any direct reflection of his own experience but rather as fictions, dramatizations 1 allegories,
bearing as remote and complicated a relation to his experience as the plays. The need to impersonalize the Sonnets
culminates at the turn of the century with an influential
discussion of them as insincere exercises in literary artifice
that could not be about Shakespeare-or about anything
else for that matter.
In this century, moral compunctions have ceased to determine readings of the Sonnets, at least in any obvious
way. We are free therefore to read the Sonnets as autobiography. And in recent decades, they have largely been read
as Shakespeare's account of himself, whether that account
is thought to consist of people, places, and events that constituted his outer life, or of the ideas, feelings, and beliefs
that animated him inwardly. Both historical and psychological approaches have their practitioners, though only
the most indomitable continue to dig and delve for facts
(for the precious little they uncover still needs to be verified from the very outside sources they seek to enlarge).
There is a much richer yield to be gotten by probing the
Sonnets for Shakespeare's inner workings. No extraneous
current in our English. Autographs became of value be-
considerations constrain such readings, not even struc-
cause they were seen to possess a personal and intimate
relation to the individual who wrote them. It is not long
tural considerations: since the 1609 ordering is not necessarily Shakespeare's, the Sonnets can be read as two units
divided at sonnet 126 where the subject appears to
until the science of graphology will emerge, the inference
of personal traits on the basis of handwriting, the analysis
of characters (in the Elizabethan sense of letters) to deter·
mine character (in our sense of personality).
Autographs are not the only form of personal writing
flourishing in the eighteenth century: collected letters,
journals, diaries, and autobiographies enjoy an unprece-
dented popularity on which book-sellers are quick to capitalize. Like these forms of writing, an autograph is a type
of self-representation that intimates or displays the private
and personal.
A signature can be seen as an abbreviated or cryptic auto-
biography; an autobiography can be seen as an expanded or
amplified signature. With an awareness that both forms of
first person writing underwent radical changes after the six-
teenth century, we finally reach my announced subject:
Shakespeare's Sonnets as autobiography.
The Sonnets are the only work we have that Shakespeare wrote in the first person, yet it has never been easy
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
change, as a collection of discrete or interconnected
groups variously demarcated, as 154 independent poems,
or as one integral sequence following either the 1609 order
or whatever order a reader prefers. A variable text coupled
with critical ingenuity is bound to yield prolifically, perhaps even inexhaustibly-were it not for interference
from the outside: from critical theory.
In the last decade, critical theory has made it difficult to
take any first person enunciation at face value. There is no
necessary relation between the historical author and the 'I'
of a work any more than there is between him and a char·
acter in a play or narrative: the first person thereby becomes simply another third. Post-structuralist theory goes
further still, cutting the tie between writing or speech and
its ostensible source, first person or otherwise. Its originthe speaking or writing subject-is dismissed as an acci-
dent of circumstance. Where the accidental aspect of that
accident of circumstance prevails, the 'Sonne,ts form a
27
�shimmering Derridean surface of free-floating signifiers;
where the circumstantial aspect dominates, the Sonnets
constitute a political, historical, and social artifact. As far as
I know, we don't yet have either a full reading of them en
abyme or as ~~cultural poetics." What we do have, however,
is not far from either in its deposition of the author:
Stephen Booth's 800 pages of extravagantly fine criticism
on the Sonnets that bring not a single comment to bear on
the man who wrote them. In one important respect we are
where moral compunctions left us at the turn of the century: dissociating the Sonnets from their author and concentrating on the impersonal features of poetic language.
In what is to follow, I would like to make it possible to
begin returning to the Sonnets as autobiography; as Shakespeare speaking about himself. But the self that is spoken
about is not a lover of acute sensitivity, a thinker of profound imaginative powers, a poet of heightened perception, or a craftsman of exceptional skill. The self of the
Sonnets is the self as a name. In speaking about that nominal self, the Sonnets do not represent it in the same way
that a self-portrait represents the artist, for that relation assumes a subject with an existence apart from the image
that portrays him. In the Sonnets the self cannot be separated from the speaking about the self; he exists as a name
coming into contact with other lexical units and occupying various syntactic positions.
I would like to look at the Sonnets as what the use of the
first person leads us to suspect they are: Shakespeare's
speaking about himself. But to do so, requires both a new
sense of self and a new sense of speaking, both of which
depend on a new sense of the workings of a proper name.
It is in the last line of sonnet 136 that Shakespeare announces his proper name: "my name is Will." And it is in
this sonnet that the subject most visibly functions as a
name whose actions are interactions with other words
within his own discourse. Each of the seven times the
word 'will' is repeated in the sonnet, 'Will' as the subject's
name cannot be distinguished from 'will's' various other
designations. The first time it is pronounced in the injunc-
tion, "Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy will," [I. 2] the
proper name 'Will' confuses our subject with other men:
the name might designate another man by that name~his
mistress's husband, for example, or another lover, not to
mention the several historical candidates scholars have
nominated. The proper name then is not proper to him; in
fact, it is not even exclusively proper. It is a common
name too, a synonym for desire or lust, common because
denoting a class or state of being, common also because
held in common by all men, more common still in vulgarly
referring to the organ (male or female) that is both instrument and object of lust. Not only does 'will' work as both
proper and common noun; it works too as verbal auxiliary
denoting future resolution, as in line 5: "Will will fulfill the
treasure of thy love." (The verbal form extends not only
the sound of the noun it follows~"Will will" ~but also its
sense, protracting it by projecting it into the future.) Son-
28
net 136 thus conflates personal and generic name, proper
and common noun, noun and verb. Will's name, rather
than distinguishing him, makes him indistinguishable not
only from other men who bear his name (his namesakes),
but also from other words that sound identical to it (homonyms).
We might say that as a sound~the sound wal~the subject Will remains at leastphonetically distinct from the different sounding words that surround his name. The difference, however, is only Phonetic, for every noun in the
sonnet that is not 'will' is a semantic substitute for will in
one of its several senses. Nouns work like pronouns, each
referring to the same subject rather than introducing a
new one. No special case has to be made for "love" in line
4 as, synonym for will as desire, nor for ulove-suit" as ex-
pression of that will; and it would take only some thumbing through Booth's commentary to identify the other
nouns with will as sexual part, male or female: "soul" [l. I]
refers to the sexual counterpart to the spiritual essence;
"things of great receipt" [l. 7], "store's account" [l. 10],
and "treasure of thy love" [I. 5] designate female sexual
capacity, the feminine empty, "nothing" [l. 12] or "none"
[l. 8] when not supplied by masculine "number" and
"one" [l. 10]. Verbs too relate to will, to acts of will:
"come"[!. I] refers to sexual climax, "check"'[!. I] to its
deferral; "knows" [l. 3], "proves" [I. 7], "reckoned" [l. 8]
to forms of carnal knowing; "fulfill" [I. 4] and "fill" [1. 6] to
sexual satisfying, "is admitted" [l. 3] and "hold" [l. II] to
female compliance. Adjectives modify sexual traits,
"sweet" [l. 4] and "great" [I. 7] are anatomical desirables,
"blind" [l. 2] applies to lack of sexual discernment; and
adverbs specify degrees of sexual penetration: "so near"
[l. l], "thus far" [I. 4], "with ease" [I. 7]. With the exception of conjunctions, prepositions, and articles, every word
in the sonnet is either a homonym or synonym for the subject's name, thereby literally verifying his admission in
sonnet 76: "every word doth almost tell my name" [I. 7]. A
language made up of homonyms and synonyms for his
name renders him anonymous. Among so many verbal
counterfeits, he can "pass untold" [I. 9] for without difference there can be no identity.
Such uniformity of vocabulary renders syntax purely
perfunctory or superficial. The word 'will' and its synonyms monopolize all grammatical positions. Phonetic repetitions make this abundantly audible in lines 5 and 6"Will will fulfill the treasure of thy love,/Ay fill it full with
wills, and my will one" ~but the same syntactic appropriation occurs in line 3's more varied syllables: "And will thy
soul knows is admitted there," which would lose nothing
in terms of sense if rendered, "And will thy will wills is
willed there"; even "thy" and "there" in this line can be
eliminated since the situation the sentence urges would
blur genetive distinctions, making his will hers, thereby
also doing away with the need for the spatial differentia tor
"there." Throughout 136, underlying the phonetic variables is the same semantic formula: "Will is will" or "Will
SUMMER 1983
�wills," a pure instance of the circular reasoninKthat Elizabethan logics identify with inordinate willfulness. The
couplet's fallacious syllogism follows the same tautology:
"Make but my name thy love, and love that still,/And then
thou lov'st me for my name is Will."
Sonnet 136 then looks like a supreme instance of willful
discourse. Will uses language to obtain his will, to prevail
rhetorically over his mistress' will so that he might have his
corporeal one. In doing so, he appropriates language, infusing its vocabulary, syntax, and logic with his likeness.
Or is it the other way around? Has he appropriated and
personalized the language or has it appropriated and verbalized him? Has it seized upon him as a name not of his
own choosing and locked him within a tight system of verbal interrelations from which he cannot emerge? The very
question brings to mind that one sense of will which the
sonnet conspicuously excludes from its homonymic ranging but which is central to any scheme even loosely Christian: will as choice, as free will. The sonnet, a petition to
his mistress, highly contrived and therefore seemingly
controlled, looks like an act of will, more so than other sonnets because of its excessive ingenuity. But if the will to
which it gives voice is lust, is Will speaking voluntarily? If
desire drives him to speak, he has not chosen to speak but
does so involuntarily, as an animal cries. Would this then
place him in the viciously inexorable cycle of sonnet !29's
"lust in action," caught up in a habitual and therefore involuntary routine of "had, having, and in quest to have,"
in this sonnet at the stage of "in quest to have" or "Mad in
pursuit"? Without any form of self-reference, 129 seems
the most impersonal sonnet of the collection; but it becomes singularly personal if we remember that Will makes
himself synonymous with lust, with involuntary will, so
that the battery of adjectival phrases in 129 ("perjured,
mur'drous, bloody, full of blame"} pertains to him as well
as to the abstraction he so knowingly and tellingly defines.
Even though his name is never spelled out in 129, it could
be said of this sonnet too that "every word doth almost tell
my name" (sonnet 76), especially when "Will" is heard in
the couplet, as phonologists lead us to believe it was in the
sixteenth century when 'well' and 'will' were pronounced
identically: "All this the world well knows, yet none knows
well." In sonnet 129, too,. the subject is present as a name,
either stated and. pronounced or implied and understood,
entangled in verbal relationships of sound and sense.
It is not only in sonnets like !29 and 136 that the subject's proper name surfaces. Through its homonyms and
synonyms, it presides over the entire collection. The first
verb in the sonnets is a synonym for will ("From fairest
creatures we desire increase") and the last two Anacreontic
sonnets concern the transformation of "hot desire" into
"holy fire of love." The youth's self-will thwarts the opening communal desire and Will's appetitive will frustrates
his final solitary desire. The first group of sonnets, the
procreation group, evolves around the idea of will as bequest "beauty's legacy" [sonnet 4], that would extend its
THE ST: JOHNS REVIEW
possessor into the future. The last two Anacreontics describe a therapeutic well that cures "men diseased" with
the exception of the subject who retreats back to the
chronic and pathological routine that admits of no change
of future. At both ends, the Sonnets are bracketed by synonymic and homonymic variants of the subject's proper
name.
Within those brackets, Will consistently emerges in a
state of incompleteness seeking to be made whole, seeking
the fulfillment that is happiness. Will exists in a state of
perpetual want that is at once lack and desire. The lack,
heightened by a consciousness of time and death, takes
the form of the multiple privative states that characterize
him: debt, poverty, sickness, loneliness, absence, lameness, bareness, pain. It seeks to complete itself through objects that would both contain him and make him content.
In the youth, in verse, in the mistress and in various combinations of the three, Wiil would be fulfilled (thereby deferring the "well-contended day" [sonnet 32], the consummation of death, with whose "fell arrest" all men must "be
contented" [sonnet 74]. In seeking fulfillment in another,
Will repeatedly attaches himself to versions of himself.
The youth is his "next self': in relationships personal and
grammatical the two are interchangeable. One mirrors the
other to such a degree that it is often assumed they share
the same name. The mistress too is a projection of himself,
of the desire by which he identifies himself, so that her
outer darkness figures forth his inner defects, her black
eyes reflect his blindness, a relation clenched verbally in
the sound "my mistress' eye" [sonnet 153] that designates
both her ocular (and sexual} eye and his pronomial I, recapitulating his self-gratifying conflation of her will with his
own. In loving either object, he falls into the same pattern
from which he tries to break the youth in the first seventeen sonnets: of self-love, "having traffic with thyself
alone" [sonnet 4], "self-willed" [sonnet 6]-the state fullblown in the monumentally monolithic sonnets of the
!20's that make ungrounded claims to self-sufficiency, as
in the supremely, in fact divinely, solipsistic, "I am that I
am." The tautology then of 136 is the collection's central
configuration: will desires will, the self seeks to complete
its wanting self in images of itselflargely of its own making,
a narcissistic and incestuous relationship that cannot be
separated from the homonymic and synonymic pleonasms
all generating from the subject's proper name.
In this paper I have been urging that the Sonnets be
read autobiographically in relation to their author, but not
in a relation to him as a particular individual experiencing
temporal and psychological events, but as a name functioning within discourse. We are accustomed to thinking
of a proper name as a social, political, and religious marker
that positions its bearer within his family, state, and
church; but it is crucial to see it also as situating its bearer
in language, as any name situates its referrent there.
If we resist having a proper name work like any other
word, it is because we tend to distinguish sharply between
29
�the names we use to identify people and the ones we use
to identify everything else. We set them apart from ordinary vocabulary by capitalizing them, and our dictionaries
omit them or relegate them to an appendix of their own.
Yet there is indication that our distinction between proper
and common was not so hard and fast for Elizabethans.
Proper names especially in manuscript were not always
capitalized, while common names in the arbitrary orthography of the day sometimes were. Nor was special attention given to their spelling. Shakespeare's last name, as I
have mentioned, received as least eighty-three different
spellings, spellings ranging from Shaftspere to Shaxbee to
Chacsper; it appears as Shagspere on his marriage bond
and as Shaxberd on a court record crediting him with
Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure.
Just as no conventions of punctuation or spelling singled
out proper names, so too no lexicons excluded them from
the rest of the language. Though there were no comprehensive monolingual dictionaries in the sixteenth century,
there were hard word lists that defined proper names as
well as neologisms and technical vocabulary. Bilingual dictionaries too would often include Christian names among
their other entries. Of course proper names had the
unique function of designating an individual rather than a
class, of naming one single man named, for example, Will
rather than a collective general group named, for example,
man. But the frequent instances in which proper names
are used generically in contexts as diverse as proverbs and
Biblical glosses, suggests that the distinction was hardly inviolable. Will, as we have seen, referred not just to one
man but to all men; so did the name Jack as in the proverbial "Jack shall have Jill" repeated in Love's Labor's Lost; so
did Tom and Dick and Harry, though Harry IV wittily exempts himself from those generic catch-alls and substitutes Francis in his stead; so do Peter and John so that
New Testament commentaries explain that the name of
Peter belongs both to Simon and to all men that are faithful and John Donne explains that not just he alone but all
men are Johns, though not all may be true Johns.
There is more in the period that invites us to treat
proper names as if they were common. The original and
derivative forms of both proper and common names were
thought to provide access to the truth of what they named.
The tradition of Biblical exegesis that originated with the
Church Fathers (Origen, Jerome, and Augustine) examined the Hebrew forms of names for both people and
things in order to comprehend their true designations. Hebrew names were thought to be God-given and therefore
to retain vestiges of the original language that man, before
the Fall and Babel, had shared with God. By analyzing Hebrew names, exegetes sought to recover the relation between thing and sign that Adam had intuited when he assigned true names to the animals in Eden. Churchmen,
especially Protestants who preferred etymologies to catholicizing allegories, relied heavily on this form of philological investigation in order to move from sign to know!-
30
edge-of-the-thing-signified. In his sermons, John Donne
frequently acknowledges his indebtedness to this form of
inquiry, as in this injunction: "To know the nature of the
thing, look to the derivation, the extraction, the origination of a word." Launcelot Andrews too devotes long passages of his sermons to etymological excursions, sometimes devoting entire sermons to a single word, as he does
in one of his Nativity Sermons in which he celebrates the
birth of the Incarnational Word by concentrating on one
word that names him-lmmanuel. For such writers, no
form of human reasoning draws a mind so close to truth as
the investigation of the names God in the Old Testament
11
gives to both men and things: His nominals be reals."
Etymologizing was not, of course, limited to religious
studies or to the Hebrew language. It had precedents in
classical and medieval writing: Plato's Cratylus was seen to
recommend the same sort of investigation in respect to
Greek and Isidore of Seville was consulted for Latin derivations and developments. The dictum of the fifth century grammarian Servius was applied to words in all languages: "names are called names because by them things
are known." Elizabethan grammars were traditionally divided into two sections, etymology and syntax, and Elizabethan logics invariably included etymology or notatio as a
valid place from which to argue. Typically in this period,
the discussion of any subject will begin with a discussion
of its name. Thomas Eliot begins his Book of the Covernow with an exploration of the word republic; Thomas
Wilson introduces his logic, The Rule of Reason, with an
extended discussion of the words logic and reason, and
Thomas Morley in his Introduction to Practical Music prefaces his descriptions of various musical terms with their
derivation, explaining, for example, why motet derives
from motion. In discussing any type of subject matter, a
writer commonly begins by interpreting its name and proceeds by following the discursive lines emerging from this
interpretation.
It is my thesis that when that subject happens to be a
man, say William Shakespeare, the same practice is followed. His name, as I hope I succeeded in showing, provides the focus for the writing that is about him. John
Donne says of the names in the Bible-those of the children oflsrael for example-that it is not so much that the
names are in the history as that the history is in the names. I
think Shakespeare's history or story of himself, his autobiography, is also contained in his name-his proper name
and its common homonymic and synonymic cognates.
Since his name is given to him and not chosen by him, and
since the phonetic and semantic interrelations into which
it draws him are inscribed in language and not put there by
him, his writing can never be entirely his own. If he had
been given another given name, his autobiography would
look and sound quite different. It might, in fact, resemble
one of the at least forty other English sonnet collections
that remain from the 1590s and early 1600s.
These sonnet collections also tell the story of their writSUMMER 1983
�ers. A quick scanning of the major ones reveals immediately that Shakespeare was not alone in fashioning his sonnets around his name. Edmund Spenser's Amoretti tells
the story of Edmund, ed mundo; they'largely turn on his
repudiation of the mundane and worldly vanity that he
himself narcissistically reflects, as in the exceptional two
sonnets [35 and 83] that mirror or echo one another word
for word and conclude with the self-referrential: "All this
worlds glory seemeth vayne to me." Sir Phillip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella tells the story of Phillip, phil ippos, lover
of horses or the ((horse to love" he becomes in his own
emblematic allegory in which he is Cupid's horse [49];
though he euphemistically rechristens himself Astrophil,
lover of a star, he is not, as Stella well knows, aiming so
high. Fulke Greville's Caelica tells the story of Greville,
and "grief' and "ill," as he himself insists, "do best decipher'' [83] him in his protracted despair of skies both Caelican and celestial. Henry Constable's Diana tells the story
of Constable whose recurring motto "preserver ever," refers to his characterizing constancy which takes the form
of stubborn and relentless importunity. William Percy's
Coelia tells the story of another Will whose self-centered
self-love is doubly suggested by his name: once, by his
given name, Will, and again by his self-reflexive family
name, Percy, per se, for himself. Barnabe Barnes's
Parthenophil and Parthenope tells the story of Barnabe
Barnes; the echoing first syllables of his two names unite
to form the sound bar bar, the sound Greeks identified
with bar-barians, outsider or non-Greeks of unrefined
speech and unrefined manner; Barnabe Barnes's sonnets
are barbaric in both word and deed: their typically stuttering phrasing expressing desire that is anything but civilized culminates in the final poem-a reiterative sestina
describing the orgiastic rape of his mistress.
In each of these sonnet sequences, the writer's name
functions as a rubric that informs and shapes his self-presentation. His name, as both proper and common noun,
provides his entry into language and sets him in relation to
those terms that constitute the story that tells of him. In
describing it this way, I do not mean to suggest that the
name is prophetic or oracular, that it dictates or predicts
an inescapable course. Every name that I have mentioned
contains an option like that option present in Shakespeare's name. Just as his name, Will, refers to both voluntary choice and involuntary appetite, so too Edmund's
name contains two worlds (in alignment with Augustine's
two cities); Greville's holds two types of grieving, one amorous pining and the other penitential contrition: Phillip's
contains two types of loving horses, the horsemanship that
puts man properly in control of his horse or the horsemanship that inversely gives the horse free rein of him. Constable's presents two types of constancy, stiff-necked infatuation and right-hearted devotion. To be sure, the name is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
given to the bearer, but the sense in which the name is
taken is of the bearer's own choosing. It is that choosing
between the options contained in the writer's name that
makes the sonnets autobiographical, that makes them
about one self rather than another. But because the options in each case are those every Christian man must
face, this form of sixteenth century autobiography can
hardly be said to individuate, to reveal an individual distinct in experience, thought, and feeling from all other
men.
I began this paper with a discussion of signatures as selfrepresentation and then proceeded to a reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets. as an autobiography centered on his
name, and have ended by suggesting that other Elizabethan sonnet sequences are autobiographical in the same
respect. Through the course of the paper, I have gradually
enlarged my focus: I have moved from signatures to a single Shakespearean sonnet, to Shakespeare's Sonnets in general, and finally expanded to include several Elizabethan
sonnet collections. In this final paragraph, I would like to
enlarge my scope still further, in fact, I will enlarge it about
as far as it can go.
My final words concern man and language in the sixteenth century. Although this paper has focused on a
rather small body of Elizabethan literature, its ultimate
aim is to challenge an assumption so prevalent that it is
rarely recognized as an assumption. Like all assumptions,
it has a beginning, and in time it will no doubt have
an ending too. It begins in 1860 with Jacob Burkhardt's
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and perhaps
has in 1980 culminated with Stephen Greenblatt's highly
applauded book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Burkhardt proclaimed that the greatest achievement of the
Renaissance was the discovery of the individual; Greenblatt demonstrates through the study of six major Elizabethan figures how the Renaissance individual selfconsciously generated his own identity. Attending such an
assumption is the equally pervasive view that in a world of
emerging individuality, language is first and foremost selfexpression, a means of articulating, asserting, and projecting selfhood. In my discussion of one of the dominant
modes of first-person writing in the Renaissance, the sonnet sequence, I hope I have provoked a serious rethinking
of that two-fold assumption. No individual emerges from
the Sonnets, no individuated psychological and emotional
entity with personalized thoughts and desires. Insofar as a
self can be said to emerge, it is a self as a proper name, a
name which rather than singling out its bearer draws him
into a complicated network of verbal interrelations that
form the pattern of his experience. Though the central
terms may differ, other sonnet writers find themselves in
variations of the same pattern and so must have Shakespeare's original readers, whatever their names.
31
�BLACKWATER
The summer ends. The winds -of aurumn rise
Chilling the earth at evening. Darkness falls
Suddenly and early. In heavy skies
From north and west assemble geese, their cails
Drifting and tossing in uneasy air.
High clouds catch final sunlight, burst aflame,
Vanish. Circling above the water, where
Rushes and grasses wait, wild mallard home.
I have come here for refuge. In the night
Shapes of the sleeping birds merge with water;
At land's edge softly their muted cries touch
And interweave the lapping waves. A white
Moon hovers near the branches of a fir;
Ten thousand stars burn cold and out of reach.
ROBERT
S. ZELENKA
A former tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md., Robert Zelenka is a
teacher, poet, scholar.
32
SUMMER 1983
�Mission over Hanoi
From A Country Such as This
James Webb
A garbage detail was throwing trash off the fantail of the
U.S.S. Shiloh. Leftover food, bags upon bags of paper and
cans, large wall lockers, unidentifiable boxes, all bounced
and rolled in the white wake of the steaming ship, mixing
with the foam. Red Lesczynski could see pieces of garbage
for miles behind the ship, all the way to the horizon in the
late afternoon sun, as if the Shiloh were marking off a trail
on the otherwise amorphous reaches of the blue, unending South China Sea.
He and a dozen other pilots were shooting their .38-caliber survival pistols, using the trash as targets. Lesczynski
practiced often off the fantail, .although he did not know
many downed pilots who had either dared or had a useful
opportunity to fire the .38 at the North Vietnamese. When
you were hoping for rescue, you evaded, as silently as possible. When rescue was hopeless, you didn't commit suicide by firing your weapon at a people who outnumbered
you 17 million to I.
But it was a way to let off steam, to relieve the boredom
of shipboard life. Except for the combat missions, he
might have been a monk at a retreat alone in a midocean
cloister with the other members of his sect. It was flat, tedious, with a day's highlight being dinner in the wardroom
and the movie afterward, or perhaps a game of chess or
Go. That in itself heightened the tension of the missions,
rather than allowing one to gear up for them. There was so
little movement or variation on the ship, and yet three of
every four days the Shiloh was "on the line" he was flung
off the carrier deck two and sometimes three times a day
by a steam catapult, as if his F-4 Phantom were a pebble in
1
©1983 by James Webb. A Country Such as This is to be published this
Fall by Doubleday. James Webb graduated from the United States Naval
Academy in 1968. He chose the Marine Corps and served as an infantry
officer in Vietnam. Among other decorations he holds the Navy Cross
and the Silver Star. Mr. Webb has previously published Fields of Fire and
A Sense of Honor.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a slingshot, to form an attack group over the sea and then
race through ground fire and missiles toward a bombing
target where for ninety seconds every fear in the world was
real, exploding all around him, calling for the most minute
recesses of his concentration. Then it would be over and
he would find the boat again, that square little speck in the
sea, and set the tail hook of his aircraft on top of a cable on
its angled deck, jerking to a violent stop. The whole thing
took little more than an hour, and he would again be surrounded by the tedious calm. It was the paradox that
taunted him, as if he were a lobster being dangled over a
boiling cookpot for a few seconds every -hour, only to be
returned to the tank. What would the lobster think, if it
could think, when it was again safe in the tank but knew it
would soon be once more dangled over the pot?
Salt air covered him like a scab; he loved the smell and
the taste. The snub-nosed pistol jerked in his hand as he
fired again and again at a five-gallon can that had once
held cooking oil. He couldn't tell whether he had hit the
can.lt bounced in the churning wake like a Ping-Pong ball,
and was soon out of range.
"Ah, the hell with it." He returned his weapon to the
chief petty officer in charge of the "famfire detail," and
left the open platform of the fantail, entering the bowels of
the aircraft carrier.
More men lived on the U.S.S. Shiloh than in Ford City.
And ali' of them had jobs. The huge Forrestal-class supercarrier was home to 4,100 men, and 80 aircraft. It weighed
76,000 tons, fully loaded. It was longer than three football
fields, and had four acres of flight deck. Its power plant
could summon 280,000 horsepower from four geared
steam turbines, enough to push the Shiloh through any
sea at 35 miles an hour. It carried more than 26 million
pounds of fuel in its hull. The Shiloh had deployed from
Alameda, California, just after Christmas 1965, and had
been operating as the center of a twelve-ship task force on
Yankee Station off the coast of Vietnam since mid-January
33
�1966. In its five months of Yankee Station duty, the Shiloh
had been to Subic Bay, Philippines; twice, for four days
each time, and to Yokosuka once, for three days. Other
than that, the Shiloh had been constantly "on the line." Its
pilots had flown 17,000 missions, and dropped 22 million
pounds of ordnance onto North Vietnamese targets.
Lousy targets, mostly. The wrong targets. Lesczynski exited a narrow, honeycombed passageway and began crossing the hangar deck. It was filled with aircraft undergoing
maintenance or being rearmed and refueled. A-4 Skyhawk
and A-6 Intruder attack craft, EA-6 Prowler electronic war·
fare planes, RA-5 Vigilante reconnaissance jets, S-2F antisubmarine planes, and SH-3 Sea King helicopters vari·
ously mixed with his own F-4 Phantom fighters across its
reaches. The hangar deck was long and wide and dark, its
bulkheads and deck a musty gray, like a basement. The
flight deck was two levels higher; planes moved up and
down on four huge elevators.
He was the executive officer of his squadron, and was
slated to take command of it within six months. He
stopped for a few minutes, chatting with crewmen who
were working on the F-4s, checking their efforts and assur·
ing them, with simple words, of the importance of their
jobs. Then he set out again, heading for the flight wardroom, for dinner.
In one corner of the hangar deck a group of sailors was
playing a fast game of basketball, shouting and running,
shirtless in the tropical heat. Across its middle, a line of
men extended from a ladder that went to the deck below,
waiting to enter the main galley and eat dinner. A few of
them wore the tight, multicolored shirts of flight deck personnel, but most of them were dressed in blue dungarees
and baseball caps. Many were reading from ever-present
paperback books that fit perfectly inside rear dungaree
pockets. Others conversed, clowning around and rau·
cously taunting each other. Many wore tattoos on their
forearms.
Lesczynski grinned blandly as he passed the different
groups of sailors, waving to a few of the men he recog·
nized. They were young and they all worked hard, twelve
hours a day for months on end, enduring cramped quar·
ters, long lines, and the lonely isolation of shipboard life.
They worked because they believed, or because it was a
job, or because it bought them liberty in arguably exotic
ports. Some worked because they didn't want to go to the
brig. It didn't matter. They kept the ship going twenty·
four hours a day, no matter what.
The 1-MC blared into every compartment, preceded by
a boatswain's eerie whistle. It was Big Brother. "Now hear
this. Now hear this. The smoking lamp is out, throughout
the ship, while handling ammunition. I say again, the smoking lamp is out, throughout the ship, while handling ammunition . .,
Lesczynski walked out the forward end of the hangar
deck, and climbed a ladder up to the "02" level, between
the hangar deck and the flight deck. The flight wardroom
34
was on the "02" level. It was less formal than the ship's
wardroom below, designed cafeteria-style to accommodate
the more fluid schedules of the pilots. In contrast to the
main wardroom, there were no Filipino stewards to hold a
tray of food in front of an officer, as if he were an aristocrat
dining downtown. No seating by rank. No careful conversation, designed to teach one the art of gentle avoidance.
Lesczynski liked the flight wardroom.
Commander Jimmy Maxwell was holding court with
two junior officers. Lesczynski's friend since his first days
of flight training was now the executive officer of the A-6
attack squadron, and like Lesczynski was on the "fleet up"
program, which would give both of them command within
a few months. Maxwell had gone spry and gray after fifteen years in the cockpit. Crow's-feet were etched deeply
into the corners of his eyes. His tight hawk's face was selfassured, and animated. Maxwell waved to Lesczynski, who
joined them. Then he smiled sardonically, without joy, his
leathered face emanating a resignation that might have
been anger, had he the luxury to question policy.
"They bagged another A-4 today."
"Over that Dong Khe site?"
"Yes, sir, old LBJ sure knows how to treat his boys. You
know why he calls us his boys, don't you? Son, I'm from
Mississippi, and I know what that means. It means he
thinks he owns us. What was it he said? The military can't
bomb a shithouse without his approval."
Lieutenant Nick Damsgard, new to the squadron and
on his first Western Pacific deployment, leaned forward,
his heavy brows furrowed earnestly. "If he'd let us go after
Dong Khe a month ago, we could have flattened it."
Maxwell feigned alarm. "You don't shoot up missile
sites before they're ready for you! They're not part of the
war until then. What do you want to do, win this god damn
thing?"
They all laughed, staring into their food, dry chortles
that indicated none of them really thought it was funny,
not when they were dangling their very lives over the
North every day in pursuit of a goal that Lyndon Johnson
had never made clear to himself, much less them. Maxwell
snorted again. "If Goldwater had won in '64, this war
would have been done with in a week, and there wouldn't
have been enough of North Vietnam left over to plant rice
on. "
Frank Salpas, also a new lieutenant, stroked his moustache, staring down into his food. 1'l'm not so sure, Com·
mander. This is a different kind of war. Johnson seems
pretty serious about doing the right thing. I mean, he's trying. He's putting at least a half-million ground troops in
the South."
Maxwell snorted again. The constant attrition of the air
war was getting to him, Lesczynski could tell. "It's not how
many troops he's got on the ground, any more than it's
how many goddamn bombs we're dropping. It's what
you're doing with them! You tell me what the hell it means
to fight a 'limited war,' all right? Do you think North VietSUMMER 1983
�nam is fighting a limited war? Shee-it. Do you feel like
you're a little bit at war when you're jinking up there,
dodging SAM missiles? Johnson won't let us knock out
SAM sites while they're being built. He won't let us take
out ships in Haiphong harbor that have SAMs visible on
their goddamn decks! He won't mine the harbor. He won't
let us go after operational MiG airfields. But we're 'his
boys' when we get our asses shot off! He must think this is
a god damn golf game or something, and he needs to give
the North Vietnamese some kind of handicap!"
Damsgard looked up from his tray, smiling ironically.
"He's stuck with a war that he doesn't know how to fight.
He just wishes it would all go away. This whole 'Rolling
Thunder' operation is a joke. Tell me how much we've disrupted the life of the North Vietnamese."
Maxwell nodded earnestly, agreeing. "Here we've got a
whole fleet of B-52 bombers that could put Hanoi back
into the Stone Age, and old LBJ sends them off to make
toothpicks out of trees on the Ho Chi Minh trail. And here
we've got light attack planes and precision fighters, and
the man sends us against the North day in and day out.
Not against targets that will hurt the North Vietnamese,
but against 'interdiction targets.' I don't know know many
pieces of railroad track I've blown away in the last five
months. But I can guarantee you that Russia and China
and the other communist countries have been replacing
them as fast as we've been blowing them away. The North
Vietnamese probably love what we're doing. It keeps their
people united. It doesn't really hurt them. And it keeps the
aid rolling in from the communist bloc."
"Can you imagine these sorts of restrictions during
World War II?" Lesczynski had listened quietly, eating his
food, but could no longer restrain his own frustration. "We
couldn't have hurt the Japanese by simply shooting down
the aircraft that attacked us. Hell, they'd still be regrouping, putting together fleets and forays! We went to their
hearts. We took the war to them. We blew away their
planes on the ground, we knocked out their industry. We
took out Tokyo." He pointed a fork, growing animated.
"Last week. Remember? Knock out the Sai Thon rail yard,
they say, but if one bomb hits the steel mill next door
you're iri deep shit!"
They all three watched him attentively. He did not often talk about the conduct of the war. For the most part,
he viewed it as unproductive, a negative morale factor for
the men who served under him. But tonight he felt unsettled, provoked. "This isn't going very well at all. Are we
going to say that the Japanese were more evil than the
North Vietnamese, and that they deserved more of our
wrath? Why? The North Vietnamese are clearly trying to
take over the South by military force. It's the North Vietnamese who have almost their entire army in the South
right now. We have stated to the world that the South
should not be subjugated against its will. If that's worth
fighting over, then it should be worth a serious, total effort. How long is it going to take Johnson to understand
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that the North Vietnamese believe they're winning, and
that this sort of bombing reinforces that belief?"
He had grown his moustache back. His lips curled into a
whimsical smile underneath its thick red gash. 'Til tell you
the truth. I don't think McNamara has the guts, and I
don't think LBJ has the clarity of thought, to fight this war.
It's that simple."
Lieutenant Salpas grunted once, then nodded, a slow
cynical grin growing underneath his moustache. "Did you
hear about LBJ's big Silver Star for gallantry in action in
World War II? Went out on a reconnaissance flight as an
observer from Congress, and the plane got shot at. He sat
there in his seat and watched, and then decided that since
he didn't shit his pants, he deserved a medal. Take a look
at his pictures. He loves to wear the lapel pin."
Maxwell grunted back, a combative grin streaking his
narrow face. "Uh-huh. Well, if that's what it takes, he can
come out here and go on that Alpha Strike with us 'boys'
tomorrow, I can make sure he gets the goddamn Medal of
Honor."
•
•
•
The real question was why they kept doing it, so well
and with such precision, day after day, week after week, in
the face of a steady trickle of losses that had been deceptive at first, but eventually overwhelming. So many shipmates, so many planes, downed for the honor of interdicting a system that by the very nature of their bombing
would grow stronger with greater outside support.
Sitting in his stateroom after dinner, Red Lesczynski
scanned the classified briefsheets from the past few weeks'
activities, one of his prerequisites as squadron executive
officer.
June 12-19: Interdiction. 100 railroad cars damaged or
destroyed, Qui Vinh, Pho Can, and Nam Dinh rail yards
damaged extensively. 5 major highway bridges dropped.
Junks and barges "lucrative."
June 20-26: Interdiction. 40 trucks, 100 junks and barges
damaged or destroyed. Me Xa highway bridge, Mai Duong
railroad and highway bridge dropped, considered essential
to the Hanoi/Haiphong transportation system. Russian
SA-2 missile site damaged in conjunction with attack on
Mai Duong. Extensive damage to yards and facilities at
Qui Vinh, Sai Thon, and Van Coi.
June 27-July 2: Interdiction. 200 railroad cars, numerous
trucks and bridges damaged or destroyed. Major strikes
against Dong Khe SAM missile site, the Dong Can military area, and Bien Son barracks.
He tried to measure those frail statistics against the terror that produced them, and the loss:
June 14: A-3 lost over North Vietnam. Orange ball seen
by observers. Crew MIA.
June 15: F-4B hit during attack on PT boat. Pilot, RIO
eject over water, rescued by SH-3 helo.
June 15: A-4E downed by ground fire, North Vietnam.
Pilot ejects, is seen on ground. POW or MIA.
35
�June 17: A-4C hit by ground fire during pullout from
dive on Vinh railroad. Pilot ejects, radios from ground that
he is about to be captured. POW or MIA.
June 19: A-1 F crashes ahead of ship after night catapult
launch. Pilot missing.
June 20: A-lH crashes ahead of ship after night catapult
launch. Pilot not recovered.
June 21: RF-8A downed by antiaircraft fire. Good ejection. Enemy defenses prevent helicopter approach. MIA.
June 21: F-8 damaged by MiG-17, 4 F-8s respond. l F-8
downed. Good ejection observed. Another F-8 downs
MiG with Sidewinder missile. 1 MiG destroyed. 1 pilot
MIA.
June 25: A-4E hit by antiaircraft fire. Pilot ejects over
water, rescued by SH-3 helo.
June 25: A-6A lost directional control on bombing run.
Pilot and RIO eject. Pilot rescued by SH-3 helo. Chute of
RIO seen, but not located. RIO MIA.
June 27: A-4E crashed during borrib run on barges. No
ejection sighted. Pilot MIA.
June 27: A-4E caught fire en route to strike. Pilot
ejected, rescued by Air Force HH-43 helo.
July 1: A-4E hit by ground fire during withdrawal from
strike. Good chute sighted. Pilot not recovered. MIA.
Well, let's see. Two years of time and salary, minimum, to
get an adequate iet pilot to the fleet. A half a billion dollars,
I'd say, to build this carrier, equip it, and put it on the line.
Millions of dollars for every plane, and the load it carried.
The reputation of our country riding in every cockpit-its
military reputation, its sense of political wisdom. And people, count two weeks of them, lost blowing away railroad
tracks. Railroad tracks! Pissed down the tube, Lyndon Johnson, pissed down the tube.
The feeling had grown over the previous six months until, every time he read such statistics, Red Lesczynski felt
as if he were somewhere between a gladiator and a whore,
although he would never publicly relate this to his men.
There was something almost malevolent in the way Navy
further admonitions from Johnson and McNamara to his
."boys," rather than warnings to those supplying the com-
and Air Force pilots were being wasted, in the restrictions
things; bicycles, even cars. At home, Lesczynski's Satur-
forced on them. God forbid that they should go after the
enemy's political centers, even though the communists
had been killing government officials in the South for a
decade. There was something supposedly inhumane
about attacking any area where there might be civilians,
although no such inhumanity had been seen in any other
war, or even in the South in this one. They flew against
railroad yards and were not allowed to attack MiG training
bases. They could not attack Soviet missile sites until they
were operational, and then, of course, it was like walking
down the tube of a cannon. They had indeed, as Jimmy
Maxwell had lamented over dinner, produced photographs of ships unloading missiles at Haiphong harbor,
and were ordered to stay away. In fact, the North Vietnamese had protested before the International Control Commission a few weeks before that U.S. planes had made
day afternoons belonged to John and his tools. There
would be other times, and he dwelled on that, but he
would never be able to see his children through the same
lens as before.
He read several hours a day. That was the one salvation
of shipboard life. He had brought more than thirty books,
and would soon be finished with them all. He had made
meticulous notes. They were a mixed bag of classics and
military oddments. He was trying to understand this war,
the Pacific, Japan. Japan was the key, and always had been.
He pulled out an old, faded volume written in 1920 by a
Russian general, Nikolai N. Golovin, in collaboration with
Admiral A. D. Bubnov. The Problem of the Pacific in the
Twentieth Century. He had found it in a secondhand bookstore in Washington. Among other things, the book had
accurately predicted both the timing and the course of
World War II.
"provocations" against foreign ships at Haiphong, causing
36
munists.
When did a missile become a missile? When did a war
become a war? When did a military professional finally cry
"foul" to this commander in chief? At times Lesczynski
tried to emphathize with Admiral Kuribayashi, who had
commanded the Japanese defenses at Iwo Jima during the
Second World War, fully knowing that he would lose the
battle. Like the Japanese commander, who died in the battle, Red Lesczynski believed not in the specifics of what he
was doing, but in what his effort represented.
He thought a lot about Jerry Schmidt as he whiled away
his hours on the Shiloh, wondering how the intense CIA
agent was dealing with the similar botching of the war
down South. Johnson and Westmoreland were obsessed
with world opinion, on the one hand knowing that it
would take a half-million American soldiers to establish a
combat presence and the support functions it would need
in order to operate halfway around the world, and on the
other not wanting to appear to be the "aggressor" in the
war. The result was piecemeal escalation, with the North
Vietnamese controlling the pace and thus the entire initiative in the war. The units in the field were performing admirably, but the United States was continually reacting,
continually behind. It was not a happy time if you were a
believer.
Sophie wrote him every day. The letters came in
bunches, with the resupply. When he had been young, he
had believed that a man could get used to being away,
could program it into the other cycles in his life. But it had
gotten harder each time, .so that now, at thirty-seven, it
was as if he had split himself in two. So much of him was
left with her, and with the children. J.J. was starting high
school. How he longed to watch his son on the football
field. Katherine was going through puberty without her father's advice. There were so many questions about dating
that she would now throw at J.J. Little John liked to fix
SUMMER 1983
�He checked his notes:
p. 43: "Japanese imperialism is not a~ invention of a handful of politicians. It is the expression oLthe spirit of modern
Japan."
p. 81: "The motives that will prompt Japan to engage in
the struggle are so deep and so vast that not one but several
wars will have to be waged before a solution is reached."
p. 38: "When Europeans fight they always endeavor to set
their own strength against that of their opponent. The Japanese endeavor to use the opponent's strength against him. By
this method you add your opponent's strength to your own
and may therefore win in spite of being weaker."
He pondered the last paragraph for several minutes before opening up the book. It made him want to show it to
Kosaka. It represented a combination of those two favorite
Japanese games, jujitsu and Go. It also made him wonder,
in an oriental triple-thinking way, whether there was indeed some connection between what he was doing and Japan's growing strength. He didn't feel smart enough to figure that out, at least not yet.
He read carefully for an hour, marking the book and taking notes. The last paragraph of Russian wisdom that he
added to his thick three-hole binder stayed with him as he
left his small desk and climbed into his bed.
p. 153: "The realities of the Pacific include the necessity of
all international agreements being backed by actual force. We
may deplore this fact the more bitterly that mankind has but
recently suffered such heavy losses in blood and treasure, but
such is the present condition of the world, and the primary
principal of positive science in search of the truth."
*
*
*
"Now, pilots, man your planes. I say again, pilots, man
your planes."
In the gray sea dawn a stiff wind pushed into the Shiloh's prow, beating insistently against the faces and chest
of pilots and sailors who busied across the long, plane-cluttered flight deck. The aircraft carrier had turned north,
into the wind, and geared up to thirty-three knots for
launching. The steady wind across the deck would help lift
the aircraft by increasing their relative ground speed. In
minutes, thirty-two of them would scream off from three
different catapults of the Shiloh, each plane taking a small
dip in front of the bow as it shifted from the pull of the
catapult to its own power, and then disappear.
Red Lesczynski left the F-4 ready room with seven other
pilots and reached his aircraft. He did a quick but thorough preflight, walking around the sleek, long-nosed jet
alongside its blue-shirted plane captain, an act that had his
life in its hands, but one that had been done so many thousands of times that it was down to a series of quick looks
and jokes with the plane captain.
"All set, Christianson?"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The plane captain grinned through snaggled teeth. Underneath the tight cap and the Mickey Mouse sound attenuators was a boy hardly older than his son. "It'll get you
there, Commander. Big one today, huh, sir?"
It was indeed, one of the largest raids of the air war, and
one of the closest ever to downtown Hanoi. He checked
his payload. A cluster of Mark 82 five-hundred-pound
bombs hung close to each wing, above cylindrical pods
that would fire Zuni five-inch rockets. Four F-4s, including
his own, would go in first, taking out as many of the radarcontrolled antiaircraft guns and missile sites as possible.
Twelve A-6 and six A-4 attack planes would follow with
heavy bombloads, going after the Bac Giang petroleum
storage area outside of Hanoi. Four of his F-4s would hold
back as a RESCAP, to come to the aid of aircraft under
attack by MiGs or damaged by ground fire. Two A-3 tank·
ers would accompany the flight for emergency refueling.
Two "Shrikes," especially configured A-4s, would provide
immediate counter-battery fire to missile sites that locked
onto the group as they went toward the target. An EA-6
"Q" aircraft would fly at the head of the group with the
F-4s, in order to provide electronic jamming and surveillance. And finally, an RA-5 would follow up the strike,
making a photograph for damage assessment. Once Lesczynski's F-4 flight rolled in, it would only take ninety seconds for the whole strike to be done with.
"Now, pilots start your engines. I say again, pilots start
your engmes."
He checked his survival gear inside the cockpit. The kid
in the blue shirt gave him the signal and he fired it up. The
A-4s went off the forward catapults, followed by the A-6s.
The sun was burning a narrow streak across the sea to
their right, the east, where eight thousand miles away his
family was then finishing dinner and speaking sorrowfully
of his absence. It was the July 4 weekend and they were in
Ford City. The flight deck was filled with aircraft roaring
down catapults and others taxiing toward them, with thin
sailors dressed in colored jerseys, red and blue and white,
yellow and purple and green, each jersey indicating without words their jobs. He followed a series of yellow-shirted
men who looked like funny insects with their goggles and
bulbous sound attentuators, the men pointing forcefully at
him, ensuring they had eye contact with him, and then
pointing again to the next yellow shirt, who guided him
through an intricate maze of equipment and aircraft toward his launching catapult.
On the forward left catapult they hooked his Phantom
into its bridle. He spoke briefly with Ted Cunningham, his
back-seater, a young lieutenant (jg) on his first combat
cruise, ensuring all their gear was a "go." His thumb went
up and then he saluted, a signal to the NCO outside, and
suddenly he was being slung along a ramp toward the ravening, empty sea, all the while gunning his Phantom with
everything it had, going from a full stop to 240 miles an
hour in the time it took him to whisper "Please, God," and
then the jet gave a sighing dip just in front of the bow,
37
�down toward the waiting water, and after that he was free,
airborne, making a slow turn to the left, picking up the rendezvous TacAn: 335 degrees, 15 miles, 10,000 feet, circle
to your left
They gathered quickly, the A-6s below him at 9,000 feet,
the A-4s below that at 8,000, the "dogs and cats" below
that, all circling with undeniable beauty in the clear blue
sky. Each of the flight leaders checked in and he then
heard Maxwell, the strike commander, give the word back
to the ship.
"Combat this is Mad Dog One. All aboard. Departing
with thirty-two."
They flew in loose formation, the F-4s and the "Q" up
front, the others spread laterally behind them in four plane
flights. As they approached the coastline Maxwell checked
in with the airborne coordinator, a C-130 orbiting in a safe
area over Laos, giving him the on and off target times.
"Combat Nail this is Mad Dog One with thirty-two, estimated eight oh five with estimated eight oh seven, over."
"Roger, Made Dog One, you're clear. New time on target zero eight ten."
Lesczynski grinned nervously, imagining Maxwell's
curses as they pulled into a wide, five-minute circle. The
Air Force was hitting the southern outskirts of Hanoi from
bases in Thailand. They'd either been late or had a pilot
down.
Then it was their turn and they powered in hard and
low, just above the green as it slipped suddenly under
them. They were "feet dry" now, over hostile ground.
They jinked as they flew, moving suddenly left and right to
throw off SAM missile radar intercepts.
"Okay, let's go."
Lesczynski pitched up suddenly, moving almost vertically, as if rising from the green earth itself. The other
three F-4s followed close behind. He came down in a
straight line, directly toward the target. The attack aircraft
would come in afterward at various angles, avoiding a pat-
tern that might be picked up by North Vietnamese radar.
"Red One, inl"
He had seen the gun sites on the photos during the preflight briefing and they were clear now as he roared toward
them, their little puffs going off around him. His aircraft
unleashed a string of Zunis, their smoky trails impacting again and again, and then he pulled out of the dive,
away as the bombs fell behind him. It all happened in a
few seconds, and the Phantoms made their turn, heading
back toward the new rendezvous over the sea.
"Red One, off."
The A-4s were next "Blue One, in."
He could hear the chatter as they talked to one another,
quick instructions.
"Heads up!"
"Look out, John!"
"Go left, now."
((Blue One, off."
Here came the first flight of A-6s. "Hawk One, in."
38
It was all so sterile once you'd made it through.
"Hawk One, off."
It was almost over. "Mad Dog, in."
"Break break break, be advised Mad Dog One is down."
The mission, his obligations, the world, all changed in
five seconds. jimmy Maxwell had been bagged. Lesczynski
immediately began to turn his fighter around and return to
the site. He had no munitions left, but he could not bear
the thought of having to stand before Louise Maxwell and
not assure her that he had done everything in his power to
help her husband.
He heard Maxwell's wingman, speaking with a forced
calm. "Okay, we got two good chutes. I've got them in
sight" The wingman contacted the airborne coordinator.
"Combat Nail, this is Mad Dog, got a bird down just off
the target I see him on the ground. I'm over him. We got
two other birds out to tank, and they'll be back directly to
you."
"Roger, Mad Dog, we'll direct."
The fire from the petroleum tanks rose twenty thousand feet, red and orange with oily curls of smoke. Lesczynski jinked and zigged and zagged, changing altitude,
shaking radar scopes, moving back toward the target They
were too far inland for the Search and Rescue helicopters
that operated off forward destroyers. The only hope was
for a jolly Green Giant to come overland from Thailand.
That would take twenty minutes or so.
"They're locked onto us, Commander!" Lieutenant (jg)
Cunningham was a seatful of terror in back of him. Red
lights flashed on the instrument panel, indicating that a
SAM radar had indeed locked them into its sights. He
jinked several times. A missile flew past them. It looked
like a telephone pole as it raced toward the heavens.
"That was too close!"
Maxwell was talking on his "beeper" survival radio. He
was about a mile west of the target. The jolly Green was
on its way. Lesczynski could hear Combat Nail instructing
it. A group of enemy soldiers was moving across a wide
field, sweeping, looking for Maxwell and his bombardier. If
the soldiers got too close it was all over. Lesczynski dove at
them from the sky, thinking to pin them down, to distract
them. They wouldn't know he was out of ammunition.
The 85-millimeter battery was in a hidden emplacement, off to his left It puffed once and he saw it for the
first time, all six guns firing until his field of vision on that
side was loaded with its flashes. A dozen orange balls were
coming at him, drifting up into space with a filmic slowness, an unreality, and he knew he was bagged. A shell
ripped through his lower canopy as he tried to pull out of
the dive and the stick became uncontrollable, the aircraft
unresponding, a dead horse on which he was saddled, rolling slowly to the left In the space of a half second, the time
it took to let go of the stick and reach for the ejection lever,
he realized that both his legs were wounded, his oxygen
mask had been torn off by shrapnel, the oxygen bottle near
his feet had exploded and set the cockpit aflame, and he
SUMMER l98l
�was peering at the ground through a hole in the underside
of his Phantom, a mere thousand feet below. The ground,
Vietnam, death, was coming up to meet him. His Phantom
was still going five hundred miles an hour.
He pulled the ejection lever and nothing happened. He
pulled it again and he was propelled through the closed canopy, the jet now at five hundred feet. His chute opened just
enough to break his impact. He hit the ground at a fortyfive-degree angle and bounced into the air again, doing a
full, almost graceful loop and then landing on his knees and
forehead, a three-point thud.
making him fall. Both his legs were bleeding, the blood
gathering in the nonregulation, powder-blue socks Sophie
had sent him. He felt silly, as much as anything else, in his
white boxer undershorts and the funny socks.
Under a clump of trees a nurse dressed the cuts on his
head, ignoring his arm and legs. It grew quiet. Finally the
all-clear siren sounded over the ubiquitous loudspeakers
and they walked him to a dirt road, where he was loaded
into a green munitions truck. A blue uniformed commissar
met the truck in front of a small cluster of buildings. He
had a terse, bulbous face. He seemed amazed at Lesczynski's size. The commissar was the first person to speak
It was all so loud. That was his first, woozy thought as he
staggered to his knees and then tried to stand. In the cockpit it had been sterile, except for the radio chatter. Suddenly the world was swimming with roars and explosions;
missiles going off, the 85-millimeter battery pumping out
three shells a second at other aircraft overhead, bombs and
missiles coming back down from the covering jets, rifles
and pistols shooting into the air with futile pops. The petroleum storage area was a towering, crackling backdrop a
mile away, whose flames reached forever into the sky, as
high as Mount Everest.
The soldiers who had been searching for Maxwell were
now sweeping toward him instead, spread laterally across
the dry rice paddy, the AK-47s pointing at him. They filled
his vision as he tried to stand, thirty of them moving in a
half jog. He reached back to disconnect his parachute, an
automatic, unthinking move, but it wasn't coming off.
Then he looked down and noticed that his left arm was
hanging useless, unresponding but for little twitches, like a
chick trying helplessly to fly. The bone in his upper arm
had snapped completely in two, and the part still attached
to his shoulder was jiggling, causing the rest of the arm to
flail around.
He couldn't even surrender. He raised his right arm into
the air and they took it for a threat, half of them dropping
into firing positions and the other half rushing him. A soldier grabbed the dangling arm and twisted it behind him,
in a tight hammerlock that kept on going until his detached wrist was up behind his head. He hit the man unthinkingly, trying to stop the pain. The others charged
him, then noticed the arm was loose and merely beat him
up instead of shooting him.
They acted as if they had never seen zippers before.
They cut his flight suit off him, stripping him down to his
undershorts, and tied a rope around his neck. In the distance, he saw a Jolly Green Giant helicopter pop in just
over the trees where Maxwell had been and then disappear, under heavy air cover. He had seen nothing of Cunningham, his back-seater. They walked him across the dry
field. Loudspeakers were everywhere, blaring terse urgencies he did not understand. An old man tried to come at
him with a scythe, and the soldiers pushed him away. The
soldiers took a delight in suddenly yanking the rope and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
directly to him. He closely examined Lesczynski's features, then made a judgment.
~<Russki?"
"Polski." He didn't know what else the man might have
meant. "American."
They took him into a large, bare room and made him sit
on the floor. People gathered at its open windows and
stared at him. Shortly, an officer in green clothes, wearing
a pith helmet, entered the room with three armed soldiers.
The officer's face was expressionless, but his eyes had the
frozen intensity of a professional killer. He stood in front
of Lesczynski and spoke in fluent English.
"] am going to ask you some questions. If you do not
answer you will be severely punished."
44
1 need a doctor."
HLater, if you demonstrate a proper understanding.
What is your name?"
"Stanislaus Lesczynski."
"What is your rank?"
"Commander, United States Navy."
"What ship did you take off from?"
"I can't answer that, according to the Geneva Agreements."
The officer issued a command in Vietnamese. Someone
behind Lesczynski kicked him hard in the head, knocking
him over. Two men grabbed him by the arms, dragging
him to the center of the room. His bad arm was up around
his head again and he screamed in agony. The crowd outside the room responded with a chant, louder and louder.
He felt alone, so alone. I'm going to die in the midst of
strangers who hate me.
They tied his ankles together, and then his wrists and
his elbows so that they touched, the ropes so tight that
they cut the blood off like tourniquets. It was done with
one rope, so that his back was arched and his frame was
immobile.
They kicked him and beat him and pinched his hands
and arms with pliers until the skin was completely numb
and the limbs were paralyzed, as if they did not exist. Each
time they asked the same question. Finally, awash with
guilt at such a small surrender, he relented.
"U.S.S. Shiloh."
"What squadron?"
The same routine. The three guards took turns to see
39
�who could hit his face the hardest. He began to realize that
he was in a small sense winning, because he was making
them pay for information they already had. Finally, he
could stand it no longer.
"VF-907."
"What kind of plane were you flying?"
"You ought to know. You shot it down."
"What was your target?"
Out of one window, past the hateful enjoying faces,
tongues of red flame still licked the noonday sky. "Where
all that fire is coming from."
The interrogator left the room for a few minutes. He returned with four photographers, who immediately began
taking pictures. He walked directly to Lesczynski and
shoved his head down to the floor. A soldier pointed an
SKS rifle into the back of Lesczynski' s head, and pulled
the trigger.
In the millisecond it took for the trigger to squeeze and
click, Lesczynski came to a sort of unrelenting peace with
his captivity. He was in such pain at that moment that he
welcomed any relief, even death. His mind went to other
things as he stared into the dirt floor. I wonder where they'll
bury me. I wonder how long it will take for Sophie to find
out. What is it like for a bullet to hit your head?
The trigger clicked. The firing pin hit an empty cham·
ber. The crowd outside taunted him. And he knew that,
for some perverse reason, they needed to use him more
than they needed to kill him.
They blindfolded him and loaded him into the bed of a
truck, and in twenty minutes he was in Hanoi.
self with that thought. And far away, in the corner of one
eye, he could see the petroleum plant still burning.
At the International House they kept him outside, in a
flower garden, for ten minutes. When the guard came to
guide him inside, he refused to move unless they gave him
water. He had asked before, and been denied. He had not
drunk anything since breakfast, a lifetime ago on the
South China Sea. Finally the guard relented, and gave him
two glasses of ice water. He knew he would pay for his obstinance, but it didn't matter. There would be so many
things to pay for that they would all blend in, anyway.
There were Caucasian reporters in the press room-; as
well as Asians. He did his best to march up to the podium,
and saluted when he reached it. In the Orient, the man
who shows no fear is king, that's what MacArthur had said,
but he was not really thinking about MacArthur at that
moment. He was remembering Crane Howell, the hobbled, irascible professor at the academy who had grown old
before his time, who had survived the work camps and the
beatings of the Japanese. If he was lucky, he would live to
be old and beaten also. There was no use hoping for more.
It was now his fate.
The reporters asked him no questions. He was merely
meant to be an object on display, like elephant tusks after a
safari. Afterward, the trucks drove him back to Hoa Lo
prison, better known among American fliers as the Hanoi
Hilton, through a different section of town, through same
groups of chanting people. And then the fun began.
For ten days they beat him. For ten days they did not let
him sleep. For ten days they asked him the same questions, over and over, slapping and punching, keeping him
*
*
*
"Put these on. You are going to a press conference."
The interrogator threw him a pair of oversized flight
boots and an Air Force flight suit, freshly washed. They
untied his hands. He had been sitting on a small stool in
the Hoa Lo prison's interrogation room for five hours, go-
ing through the same string of questions and beatings as
before. They had to help him into the clothes. One of the
guards fashioned a sling for his arm out of thin gauze.
They loaded him onto the back of a military truck and
made him stand at the front of the truck bed, holding onto
a bamboo pole. The truck lumbered through endless Hanoi
streets, another truck in front of it with a spotlight on him,
another one following, filled with journalists. Crowds
gathered on every street at the urgings of the Big Brother
loudspeakers, chanting at him and throwing things. Warm
urine covered one side of his face. Feces impacted on the
bamboo rail near his hand. The crowd periodically surged
against the truck, forced back by troops with bayonets. But
even Red Lesczynski could tell the whole thing was staged.
The demonstrators were somehow flat, mechanicaL They
looked sideways, for their controllers, as often as they did at
him. Wonderful stuff for pictures. Red Lesczynski on display.
Hanoi was actually a beautiful city. He preoccupied him-
40
in leg irons, laughing as he urinated and shit on himself.
For ten days they allowed his wounds to fester, until his
legs were swollen and the gashes had turned black, the blisters splitting and draining onto the floor, as if he were a
frankfurter on a spittle over a hot fire. For ten days they
worked the ropes, tightening them and loosening them to
regulate his pain, until he developed infected blisters that
would make permanent scars, his "varsity stripes" along
his wrists and upper arms. For ten days he saw no one but
the guards, heard no voices but Vietnamese, found himself locked inside a seven-foot-square repository of darkness and filth that made him wish over and over that he
could merely die and see the end of it.
And after ten days, he found himself writing with
numbed fingers the words that they dictated into his delirious, semideadness:
I. I condemn the United States Government for its aggressive war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
2. I have encroached upon the air space of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam.
3. I am a war criminal.
4. I have received humane and lenient treatment from
the people and the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
SUMMER 1983
�Truth-Telling and the Iliad
Douglas Allanbrook
The terrible word truth implies a parity between what
we see and what we say. There are two books which most
vividly exhibit this quality of truth. These two books are
the Iliad and Thucydides' history. I sometimes think that
they are the only two that do so consistently. Both books
reflect in their words and accounts, speeches and stories,
the real that is in front of our eyes and that is so difficult to
own up to or to talk about. It would be too much to attempt to talk about both of these incomparable books, and
tonight I shall talk only about the Iliad. It would be too
much to attempt in an hour to talk with any kind of completeness about the Iliad, and I shall merely try to fix your
attention upon the salient features of the poem's words,
similes, Gods, and story. The thesis underlying the pointing out is the traditional one that the Iliad is the truest and
most famous poem because of its unvarying and harsh vision, its unwavering eye. The singer of the poem never
turns aside into the justification of Gods, cities, or individual men. He tells the truth as he see it. His poem is the
artifact of things as they are.
Everyone who talks about Homer is indebted to the po·
et's commentators throughout the ages. A lecture of)acob
Klein's focused my attention on the dimensions and passion of the story of Achilles and Zeus. I have also been influenced in what I have to say by two modern writers on
the Iliad, Redfield and Whitman, and have used certain of
their observations, though disagreeing with certain of
their conclusions. The writer who looms hugely on the horizon of any talk about Homer, and who is Homer's most
important critic, is Plato. This lecture certainly disagrees
with his criticisms, all the more so as it is clear that Plato
loved and revered the poem.
The beginning of the road through the poem will be to
look at words, at nouns which name things; then Homer's
similes will be examined; next proper names and lists and
Douglas Allanbrook is a composer and tutor at St. John's College, An":
napolis, Md. His most recent works arc a "Serenade for Piano and Orchestra" and a set of three "Love and Death Songs" for high voice and
chamber ensemble.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
catalogues; next the names of the Gods and what they illuminate; and finally the story itself as it illuminates the men
and gives them to us as models for our own looking in gen·
era!. There may be a certain madness in this method of
looking at things; generally when we talk about things we
argue about them, justify them, or attempt to shove them
into the artificial frame of a problem to be solved. Homer
is not rhetorical, and language talking about him should
not be either, although it is well nigh impossible to talk in
any way consonant with his purity and passion.
Homer names everything he sees and has lots of time at
his disposal. He has a lovely flexible hexameter to fit his
words into, and while his grammar is simple, his vocabulary is enormous. Everything to be seen is named specifically. Reading the poem at random one finds words for
yoke-rings for oxen, for two-handled goblets, and a word
for the tiller of a boat which is always in the plural because
the boats he talks about had two tillers. When Odysseus
sails back with Chryse in Book I, returning her to her father, all the details of the docking are spelled out:
But Odysseus
meanwhile drew near to Chryse conveying the sacred
hecatomb.
These when they were inside the many-hollowed harbor
took down and gathered the sails and stowed them in the
black ship,
let down mast by the forestays, and settled it in the mast
crutch
easily, and rowed her with oars to the mooring.
They threw over the anchor stones and made fast the sterncables.
[!, 430-436]
When Priam in Book XXIV comes to Achilles' shelter all
details of the wagon which will convey Hector's body back
to Troy are named:
... and they in terror at the old man's scolding
hauled out the easily running wagon for mules, a fine thing
new-fabricated, and fastened the carrying basket upon it.
41
�They took away from its peg the mule yoke made of
boxwood
with its massive knob, well fitted with guiding rings and
brought forth
the yoke lashing (together with the yoke itself) of nine
cubits
and snugged it well into place upon the smooth-polished
wagon-pole
at the foot of the beam, then slipped the ring over the peg,
and lashed it
with three turns on either side to the knob, and afterwards
fastened it all in order and secured it under a hooked guard.
carrion dogs see is a mystery. You recall the opening of the
poem:
[XXIV, 265-74]
[1, 1-7]
Achilles' shelter where the fateful meeting with Priam
takes place is described minutely:
It is not clear that birds and dogs see what we see, and for
us their sight seems pitiless. Certainly as the opening of
the poem sings, they are always present, looking from on
high as the vultures do, or circling the edges on ground
level like the dogs.
Nothing is said about these objects named; they are
named as what they are, and not so much written about as
presented. What is seen is named specifically as what it is
when it reveals itself to sight. It is not that a vase is twohandled, it's a two-handled vase; it is not that a cauldron is
unfired, it is an unfired cauldron; it is not that a chest is
made of cedar, it is a cedar chest. Even more clearly we
never see a sword, we see a bronze sword; we never see
red, we see a red fire. Direct perception is always correct, it
cannot lie. The stick seen under water does appear
crooked, and it would be false in this primary sense we are
talking about to say that it was straight. It is crooked to our
vision, and something would be wrong with the world if it
were not. Sentences that remain true to this firstness or
primacy of vision as imaged in a word are always indicative. Nouns in such sentences indicate things. They are
placed in their sentences in time as objects are in space.
This is language approaching the state of painting, while
simultaneously, in this poem, the words are being sung. A
painting argues nothing, proves no point. Music although
in time, and an aspect of language, argues nothing, proves
no points. Paintings and music see and hear for us. Similarly with so many of the words and sentences of the Iliad;
they argue nothing, they prove nothing, they say clearly
what is seen in a perpetual and vivid present, in moments
of firstness and primary sensing, moments that are the opposite of the infinite and the unbounded, that are crystallized facets in the eye of attention focused on each object.
There is no reality worth a damn unless it is attended to,
and attention must be fixed with a word that is an image.
The sentences in the Iliad are almost all indicative. The
sun is out, and there are no nebulous futures or contraryto-fact conditions. Nothing is hypothesized, nothing is abstracted, nothing needs to be proved, as there are no problems to be solved and there is no path of discourse which
leads from or goes under what is in front of us.
Certain special words in the Iliad occur over and over
... a towering
shelter the Myrmidons had built for their king, hewing
the timbers of pine, and they made a- roof of thatch above it
shaggy with grass that they had gathered out of the
meadows;
and around it made a great courtyard for their king, with
hedgepoles
set close together; the gate was secured by a single doorpiece
of pine, and three Achaians could ram it home in its socket
and three could pull back and open the huge door-bar;
three other
Achaians, that is, but Achilleus all by himself could close it.
[XXIV, 448-56]
After the death of Hector, when Achilles thinks of
"shameful treatment for glorious Hector", everything is
named:
In both of his feet at the back he made holes by the
tendons
in the space between ankle and heel, and drew thongs of
ox-hide through them,
and fastened them to the chariot so as to let the head drag.
[XXII, 396-98]
As we the listeners to the poem follow the action of the
story and listen to the words, it is as if we were looking
down on the plain in front ofTroy.lt is as if the names, the
nouns, the substantives, were glinting in the sunshine. All
the objects in the bright space between the blackhulled
boats and the Skaian Gates glitter and shine; they reveal
themselves to our eyes as if we were movie cameras or vultures or dogs. The art of Homer is like the movies; there is
the camera eye, the selection of objects to be photographed, the quick shifts of scene from the beach to the
interior of a house in Troy, the close-ups and the dialogue.
Strictly speaking, a camera sees nothing; it records for a
director who has a story to tell. What exactly vultures and
42
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the
Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong
souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the wil1 of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.
SUMMER 1983
�again. Each occurrence of the word is specific and apt in
its naming. But in its manifold occurrences the word casts
a web of meaning which links together all of the occurrences. The most notable of such w6rds is the word "fire."
In Book I the pyres of the dead Achaians consume the
bodies of those stricken of Apollo's plague. In Book V
when Diomedes begins his day of glory Pallas Athene
"made weariless fire blaze from his shield and helmet" (V,
4). Hector's funeral is conducted with quiet finality, and
his body burns accompanied by the proper lamentations
of his family and his city. Fire finally reaches the boats of
the Achaians and accomplishes the plan of Zeus for Achilles' glory. When Hector is dead on the ground, killed by
Achilles and the trickery of Athenc, the Achaians remember that fire:
And the other sons of the Achaians came running about
him,
and gazed upon the stature and on the imposing beauty
of Hektor; and none stood beside him who did not stab
him;
and thus they would speak one to another, each looking at
his neighbor:
"See now, Hektor is much softer to handle than he was
when he set the ships ablaze with the burning firebrand."
[XXII, 369-74]
Patroklos' body is consumed by fire together with the
bodies of the twelve young Trojans slaughtered by Achilles for the greater glory of his friend, and Achilles circles
the pyre dragging Hector's body by the heels. In the terrifying climax of the poem Achilles stands on the ditch and
bellows, his head encircled with a nimbus of fire. He
strikes terror into the hearts of the Trojans, who well sec in
it their own destruction. Achilles is like fire, short-lived, destructive, gleaming, and irresistible, a pile of ashes at the
end-"consumcd by that which it was nourished by," to
speak as our best poet speaks. Achilles also looks like fire.
In Book XXII, just before the end of Hector, Achilles
closes in on him "like the flare of blazing fire" (XXII, 13 5).
The word "fire" becomes more than the sum of its individual instances. It becomes part of the meaning of the
whole poem as we see the work of fire and the lives of the
heroes, and the heat of the battle, and the burning of
corpses, and the sacrifices to the gods, and the certain future fire which will consume Troy and finally cast young
Astyanax, Hector's son, to instant death over the walls.
The meaning of such a word is what we mean, I suppose,
by the word "symbolic." The word is in each specific instance precise, but in its many instances its meaning
spreads abroad to encompass a whole network of signification. We grasp the enormity of its meaning without demonstration or argument. It exhibits itself, and shines in our
eyes.
One word, according to authorities, is dangerous to utter. The first word of the poem, the subject of the poem in
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the objective case, is a special holy word, a "tabu." The
word is, of course, 1'-~""· the wrath of Achiles which will
bring manifold destruction, etc. It is a word that is reserved
for Achilles and the gods; it names a brooding and potential power. It always presages some terrifying future. It is
hardly adventitious that 1'-~"" is the first word in this poem
whose story has a tension and a resolution that is as clearly
aimed as the loosing of an arrow toward a target. In the
network of meaning in the poem it is clear that this sacred
"wrath" is like fire. Any ordinary wrath blazes up like a
fire, but this wrath is like a holy fire, which is not to be
gazed at any more than the head of a Gorgon is. Through
it the will of Zeus is accomplished, and many heroes
slaughtered. The word occurs very rarely in the poem,
while the word fire is ever-present in the fabric of the
story. The word is avoided, although one can circle around
it by talking of things that are like it or by finding circumlocutions that glance toward its meaning. The meaning of
the word is the story itself, as the poet clearly announces in
his invocation to the goddess.
Vision and the naming of things, or seeing and saying,
have yet another aspect which has been hidden and only
hinted at in what has been said so far about the Iliad. We
see only what we pay attention to, and the poet pays close
attention. We see a particular object only by coming to it
from something else or by going from it to something else.
The specialness of what we see is not only that it is a brazen sword with a golden handle, but that it is different
from anything else in its very particularity. It is also different from anything that is next to it, or indeed it could not
be seen. It may be like something, but must always remain
different. Words used truthfully reflect this, and that is
why Homer constantly uses similes and very rarely employs metaphors. It is, after all, a special kind of lie to say
that my love is a rose. She is a girl and she is like a rose, or
better like a red, red rose. Achilles is not a fire, he is like a
fire, and he docs not fight water, but battles with a special
river which runs along the edge of the battlefield and
which has one name which is employed by the gods, the
Xanthos, and another name, the Skamandros, which is
used by humans. It is clear that fire and water are antithetical, but it is in the samenesses and differences presented at
once in a simile that vision is both clarified and respected
for what it is. To be sure, there are a few metaphors in
Homer. People sleep "their brazen sleep," "night wraps
up their eyes," or someone is called "the scourge of Zeus."
Similes, however, are the ever-present figure of speech in
Homer, and they range from the simplest ones to comparisons of enormous complexity and irony. Simple similes
give flashes of vision as the images dart from like to like
while preserving the necessity of seeing things as separate.
Ajax carries his shield "like a wall." Athene and Hera walk
into battle eager to help the Achaians "like shivering
doves." Men attack "like lions"; their armor "glitters like
the thunder flash of Zeus."
Complicated similes reveal more, and Agamemnon is
43
�never seen more clearly than in the simile near the beginning of Book XI. Let us read it:
And as a lion seizes the innocent young of the running
deer, and easily crunches and breaks them caught in the
strong teeth
when he has invaded their lair, and rips out the soft heart
from them,
and even if the doe be very near, still she has no strength
to help, for the ghastly shivers of fear are upon her also
and suddenly she dashes away through the glades and the
timber
sweating in her speed away from the pounce of the strong
beast;
so there was no one of the Trojans who could save these
two
from death, but they themselves were running in fear from
the Argives.
[XI, 113-121]
Agamemnon has just killed and stripped Isos and Antiphos, two sons of Priam. Achilles had previously caught
them on the slopes of Mt. Ida and released them for ransom. This time Agamemnon struck Isos in the chest above
the nipple and hit Antiphos by the ear with the sword, and
eagerly stripped off their armor, which armor he had seen
before when Achilles had brought them in from Ida. Before this we have heard Agamemnon's fierce words in
Book VI when his brother Menelaos was moved to pity a
Trojan:
"Dear brother, o Menelaos, are you concerned so tenderly
with these people? Did you in your house get the best of
treatment
from the Trojans? No, let not one of them go free of sudden
death and our hands; not the young man child that the
mother carries
still in her body, not even he, but let all of Ilion's
people perish, utterly blotted out and unmourned for."
[VI, 55-60]
This side of Agamemnon was present to the listener before the simile in Book XI, but what the listener to the simile becomes startlingly aware of is a truth about Agamemnon as he is placed in juxtaposition with Achilles. What
was begun and seen in Book I when the two men stood
apart in their bitter quarrel is now made manifest. Agamemnon may be a bumbling king of kings, an unsure
leader of the host, too big for his boots, but for all that he is
a killer, like the lion of the simile. Earlier in Book XI you
will recall his shield with the face of the Gorgon upon it,
the symbol of fear and trembling and horror. We never
have physical description of the heroes in the Iliad; we
don't know the color of their eyes or of their hair. Only
ugly Thersites with his peculiar eggplant-shaped head is
described in physical detail. We know Achilles is beautiful,
44
and that Priam is so in another way. We envisage great
Ajax, the wall of the Achaians, and noble Diomedes. The
great, vacillating, and violent Agamemnon is always
present to our eyes after this simile, all the more so as he is
remembered by being placed in conjunction with Achilles,
who had spared the lives of the two boys that Agamemnon
is here shown slaughtering as a beast slaughters.
Ten books later Homer portrays Achilles slaughtering
yet another boy whom he had previously ransomed. This
is the near-monstrous book in which Achilles butchers
Trojans beside the river Skamandros and then launches
himself against the divine river itself. You recall what he
says to the boy before killing him:
"So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?
Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are.
Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid
and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me
immortal?
Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny,
and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime
when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also
either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the
bowstring.''
[XXI, 106-lll]
If we were to construct a simile ourselves it would not be a
bestial one; with all of our later stories in us we might well
liken Achilles to an Angel of Death, but we would never
liken him to a lion.
Let us now examine another simile earlier on in Book XI
than the one we just looked at. The two armies are facing
each other, drawn up in two lines:
And the men, like two lines of reapers who, facing each
other,
drive their course all down the field of wheat or of barley
for a man blessed in substance, and the cut swathes drop
showering,
so Trojans and Achaians driving in against one another
cut men down, nor did either side think of disastrous panic.
[XI, 67-71]
Here our seeing is wrenched from the world of war to the
world of peace. Reaping a harvest is the co-operative work
of a group of men, and the grain is a blessing, and bread is
life-giving and puts strength into the body, and the man
who owns the field is blessed in his substance. Two things
that look alike-the lopping-off of stalks of grain and the
cutting down of human bodies-are both hard work. The
result of one is fruit and nurture, and of the other desolation. We of course use Homer's simile constantly, but as a
metaphor. We speak of "death, the grim reaper," or of infantry soldiers being "mowed down" by machine~gun fire,
or even push our metaphorical perversity so far as to speak
of "body counts" as if we were numbering the stalks of
grain that fall or counting our merchandise. Metaphors
SUMMER 1983
�conceal the truth often, if they are not downright lying.
Men are not lions and bodies are nOt for counting. No man
is an anonymous unit to be counted. Agamemnon is like a
lion slaughtering a young deer, and foot soldiers killing
each other in facing lines are like reapers. The seeing of
one thing as like another thing to the eye but also as startlingly different to the intelligence reveals the character of
what is seen. In this grim poem of violence, wrath, and war
there is never a simile which lulls us into acceptance of war
as something ordinary, never a passage which lets us get
used to it. It is always seen for what it is, the field of hateful
Ares, not the field of peaceful harvest. The difference between the scenes of peace and the scenes of war make the
battlefield agonizingly clear. War is not excellent, although
heroes gain glory in it. The poem, in its truthfulness, never
suggests for a moment that we will ever be without war.
The famous simile at the end of Book VIII, so often
commented upon throughout the ages, accomplishes a
vaster kind of seeing by means of likeness and difference.
Book VIII, as you will recall, is where Zeus puts into play
his plan for Achilles' glory. The Achaians will be driven
back temporarily and Hector will be unleashed. Hector has
just boasted of what he has and will accomplish, and has
voiced the poignant and overweening wish:
"Oh, if I only
could be as this in all my days immortal and ageless
and be held in honour as Athene and Apollo are honoured
as surely as this oncoming day brings evil to the Argives."
[VIII, 538-41]
The first likeness and difference here is between stars and
fires; another likeness and difference arises as one gazes
upon the still moon-and-star-lit landscape and the thousand fires burning in the plain between the river and the
ships. Quiet and peace envelop both the plain and the
landscape. Stars and fires both glitter, and both seem uncountable in their numbers; there are a thousand fires and
each has fifty men, and who can count the stars. The
beauty and terror and quiet which are behind the truth of
the view come all from the awful differences. The landscape is a world of peace inhabited by a shepherd whose
heart is gladdened by the clarity of the night. The stars in
their purity and eternity, though shining, are the antithesis of the fires, which will be ashes as the day dawns and
destruction begins. We, the listeners, grasp the scene like
visitors from another realm, from another star-system,
knowing the past and the future; yet simultaneously we
are not from another realm or from another star-system,
but live on the plain, waiting anxiously for another dawn.
We are ourselves like a simile of sameness and difference
in our attending to the poem, as we are both like and unlike what we see.
A whole host of similes introduces the whole host of the
Achaians in Book II before the mighty catalogue unfolds
in all its specificity. First the gleam from their bronze dazzles the upper air as an obliterating fire lights up a vast
forest. Next, pouring from their ships and shelters with the
earth resounding under their feet and under the hooves of
their horses, they are likened to nations of birds, of geese,
of cranes, of swans settling in clashing swarms onto a water
meadow. The host takes position, thousands of armed
After this he sacrifices to the gods, but they "took no part
of it/ ... so hateful to them was sacred Ilion" (VIII, 55051). The simile is as follows:
So with hearts made high these sat night-long by the
outworks
of battle, and their watch fires blazed numerous about them.
As when in the sky the stars about the moon's shining
are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness,
and all the high places of the hills are clear, and the shoulders
out-jutting,
and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from the
heavens
and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the
shepherd;
such in their numbers blazed the watchfires the Trojans were
burning
between the waters of Xanthos and the ships, before Ilion.
A thousand fires were burning there in the plain, and beside
each
one sat fifty men in the flare of the blazing firelight.
And standing each beside his chariot, champing white barley
and oats, the horses waited for the dawn to mount to her high
place.
[VIII, 553-65]
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
men, as leaves and flowers appear in their season. Next
they stand in such numbers, their hearts burning to break
the Trojans, as multitudinous nations of swarming insects
which, avid for milk, drive hither and thither about the
sheepfolds in spring when the milk splashes in the milkpails. Only this last simile switches to the world of men
and peaceful human work. The order has been: obliterating forest fire, nations of birds, leaves and flowers in sea-
son, nations of insects about the stalls of shepherds. The
focus finally narrows down to the leaders of the host, and
last of all to the leader of the leaders, Agamemnon:
These, as men who are goatherds among the wide
goatflocks
easily separate them in order as they take to the pasture,
thus the leaders separated them this way and that way
toward the encounter, and among them powerful
Agamemnon,
with eyes and head like Zeus who delights in thunder,
like Ares for girth, and with the chest of Poseidon;
like some ox of the herd pre-eminent among the others,
a bull, who stands conspicuous in the huddling cattle.
[II, 474-81]
This whole great list of similes, with its carefully controlled
45
�order of seeing things, and all of the other similes we have
looked at, have one characteristic which is so simple that it
almost escapes notice. Everything is compared to something that is always as it is, whether the comparison is to
objects or animals, to activities or to landscapes, or to the
recurrence of spring: lions, reapers, goatherds at their
rounds, nations of birds and insects, forest fires, stars. The
great succession of similes just looked at in Book II has as
its function the focusing, the funneling of our attention to
the great list of proper names and place-names which follows in the Catalogue. Proper names, of course, are all
over the Iliad, not merely listed once in the Catalogue. No
one in this poem is anonymous, whether he be an
Achaian, a Trojan, or an outlander speaking some outlandish speech. No one in this poem dies without being
named, and his name is attached to where he came from.
In this the poem is true to all of us. We may not all be
brothers, but we all have names and parents and were born
someplace, and to ignore this is to lie in the blackest manner known to lying. No one is a number, and people are
not to be counted, they are to be named. There are many
warriors in this poem named at the moment of their death
who otherwise play no part in the story:
So Iphidamas fell there and went into the brazen slumber,
unhappy, who came to help his own people, and left his
young wife
a bride, and had known no delight from her yet, and given
much for her.
First he had given a hundred oxen, then promised a thousand
head of goats and sheep, which were herded for him in
abundance.
Now Agamemnon, son of Atreus, stripped him ...
[XI, 2 41-46]
Or consider poor Gorgythion, named by name and descent, and immortalized by a simile:
Gorgythion the blameless, hit in the chest by an arrow;
Gorgythion whose mother was lovely Kastianeira,
Priam's bride from Aisyme, with the form of a goddess.
He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of
springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm's weight.
[VIII, 303-308]
If I were to tell the truth about the war that I knew, it
would certainly not be an account of the so-called strategy
of the vain and posturing commanding general. Rather I
would tell of a boy from the tobacco-growing country of
the upper Connecticut river in Ivlassachusetts who married a young virgin from his own town a month before sailing, and who met his death quickly, shot from behind by a
German patrol.
The Catalogue in Book II is the very triumph of specific-
46
ity, a great parade of proper names and places drawn up in
the plain for the listener to hear about. The Muses themselves are invoked as being goddesses who know all things,
and who remember all those who came beneath Ilion. It is
as if I, in telling the terrible story of Gettysburg and Antietam, were to call on some recording angel to help me with
the resounding catalogue of names and places from Portland, Maine, to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The catalogue
has the endless fascination of an exhaustive list; the listener checks off every place he has ever head of, and learns
some new ones. A Canadian humorist once commented
that the Catalogue of Ships in Homer had all the dignity
and beauty of the New York Telephone Directory. To
which one can only reply that the Telephone Book is fascinating in its very specificity; it is better than imagination,
or rather it feeds the imagination, and fills the reader with
wonder and terror at the thought of all those names, nationalities, streets, and boroughs.
So far in this lecture tonight we have examined names
of objects, names of animals, names of artifacts. Certain
names such as <lfire" and <lwater" assumed a vaster meaning, even though each instance of their use was specific.
We talked finally of proper names, proper nouns, people
rescued from anonymity as they died and were named. We
have yet to see the truth of the named heroes, Achilles and
Hector and Ajax, the meaning their names assume for us,
although much was revealed about the name Agamemnon
by the lion simile. To some sceptics it may seem suspect to
talk about the name of Achilles as having meaning. Achilles' mother is a goddess, and most of the other heroes are
of divine descent. Is there any real referent for us in such
names? Was Achilles ever? He's not Alcibiades, or Caesar,
or General Patton. Can the name of a person which is not
linked to a real person have any relation to the truth? The
names of the gods disturb listeners more than the names
of the heroes. This may be more so nowadays that in previous ages, though no one was more upset by the names of
the gods than Socrates. What are the names of the gods
referring to? Are they merely allegorical names? Dare we
even give names to gods? The names of the gods must
have been like a thorn in the side of many of your thoughts
and discussions about Homer. By a kind of reversal of
meaning you may well have been put off by the fact that
the gods appear so real; they are married, they have domestic quarrels, brothers and sisters detest each other,
they have mansions, they eat together; goodness as such
seems to have little to do with them, though they certainly
exhibit specific excellences. Another knot to disentangle
in the Iliad is that great Zeus is so different from the other
gods. He stands apart from the other immortals with a divinity and power which Achilles' appears akin to. Zeus'
dire silence throughout the long tension of much of the
poem, until Achilles' day arrives and the plan of Zeus unfolds in its double-edged fulfillment, is the very will of the
poem, as the poet tells us in the opening lines. Even this
great mystery, Zeus, however, is hoodwinked by his wife,
SUMMER 1983
�and his threats to her and to the rest of his family are never
carried out. Another aspect of the g0ds which may disturb
our listening to the story as true may be best stated by remembering that Herodotus says that Homer and Hesiod
named and defined the gods. Certain listeners may be
used to considering the gods as formless, as Good, as not
being something that was written up by a poet; in other
words many listeners have been used to the gods as being
real by the very fact of their not being like anything we see
and by their not being embodied in a fiction. The gods are
called the "deathless" ones, the immortals, and it is by examining closely this name that I propose that we get closer
to the truth of their names. This real name, the "deathless
ones," is a name that speaks of a lack of something. They
don't die, and we do. It is not merely that they are bigger,
more beautiful, and more powerful than we are; most importantly they are other than mortal. In all of this the gods
are like similes, and our vision of ourselves and the world
as it is is sharpened by the presence of the gods. I am in no
way saying that they are similes, and God knows they are
not metaphors. They are like similes in that they sharpen
our attention to what lies around us. The fact that they are
without death but like us gives their actions at times a kind
of frivolity. War is a comedy for them; if Ares and Aphrodite are wounded in the battle before the walls of Ilion it is
only a kind of play which will be put right by their parents.
Artemis, the killer maiden, is spanked by her mother until
the deadly arrows fall out of her pockets.
The gods are like and unlike the listeners to the poem in
another way. They look down on the plain of Troy, and see
what goes on; they know the beginning, the middle, and
the end of the story, and enjoy it just as we do; and again
like us turn aside from it and go on about their own affairs.
They are the guarantors of the fiction. The difference
again is of course that they are "deathless," and their enjoyment is completely aesthetic, unsullied by suffering or
the approaching evening. The following short poem by
Emily Dickinson is not for them, though in some awful
way one suspects that they might appreciate it, as mere
aesthetes among us do:
I like a look of agony,
Because I know it's true;
Men do not sham convulsion,
Nor simulate a throe.
The eyes glaze once, and that is death.
Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung.
The lives of the gods obviously can never be tragic; their
dangers and their wounds are only ripples on a surface.
Ichor runs in their veins, not blood, and they are nourished
with nectar and ambrosia. Their deathless light in the upper air makes the listener see more clearly the plain of
Troy and the slaughter and passion and travail which take
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
place there. They resemble the simile of the stars and the
campfires.
All seeing necessitates something different next to what
we see. We see a chair because it stops being a chair when
it is in place, and next to something else which is not a
chair, even if it be air. The limit of life is death, and we
apprehend mortality in the Iliad by watching the deathless
ones. We, the listeners, see what we are in the poem by
seeing what we are not, and the heroes of the poem itself
are always face to face with the deathless ones and with
death; they are descended from the deathless ones in half
their being, but receive no guarantees from their descent;
they have no insurance against the end of life. It is more
difficult to pin down what is revealed to us by the character of the gods. Ares may be the easiest one to talk about
first, even though he is related to no special hero in the
poem. He is sung of as despicable and quarrelsome, and he
changes sides from the Achaians to the Trojans. Athene in
Book V instructs Diomedes:
"Be not afraid of violent Ares,
that thing of fury, evil-wrought, that double-faced liar
who even now protested to Hera and me, promising
that he would fight against the Trojans and stand by the
Argives.
Now, all promises forgotten, he stands by the Trojans."
[V, 830-34]
He is accompanied by allegorical figures of Terror, Fear,
and Hate when we first meet him in Book IV, just before
Diomedes' great day. Zeus, his father, hates him. At the
end of Book V he says to his son:
"Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.
To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olyrnpos.
Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles.
[V, 889-91]
In this poem where war is the daily doing of the heroes it is
a remarkable sign of the clear vision of the poet that the
god of war is associated with no single hero, and is shown
as a despicable, brazen, and howling youngster who bellows, and is worsted by his sister and hated by his father. It
cannot be merely that Ares represents one aspect of war,
defeat, and terror, as one noted commentator argues. Ares,
the god of war, is simply and clearly a vision of the nature
ofthe battlefield. No single hero is illuminated by him as is
Achilles by Zeus, or Paris by Aphrodite. This same vision
of war is present throughout Thucydides, and seems to
guide his hand as we watch the spectacle of barbarism unleashed upon Greece not by barbarians but by war. The
same vision enlivens the vivid scenes of the battle of Waterloo in Stendahl and the battle of Borodino in Tolstoy.
Ares has no favorites and takes no sides.
Apart from Ares, seeing what the gods are like means
looking harder at the person each is linked with. Helen is
not like Aphrodite when she says to her in Book III,
47
�'"Strange divinity! Why are you still so stubborn to beguile
me?"' (III, 399), and, later in the same speech:
"I am not going to him. It would be too shameful
I will not serve his bed, since the Trojan women hereafter
would laugh at me, all, and my heart even now is confused
with sorrows"
[III, 410-12]
Helen is humiliated by her goddess when she is told to repair to her chamber and Paris is scooped out of the battlefield and dumped into her bed. To the old men on the wall
she seems like a very goddess in her beauty, but within herself she is divided and at war with herself, and it takes Aphrodite's curses and anger to drive her to Paris' arms.
When Athene stays Achilles' hand in Book I at the
height of his murderous quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles is already debating within his chest two courses. Again
the goddess is like and unlike him, and is seen by no other
man. She does not make him do what he does; she holds
him back from one course and points him to the other
course he had already been debating within.
Zeus and Achilles are alike in their loneliness, in their
withdrawal, and in their detachment and lucidity as they
view the plain and the battle. When Thetis comes to Olympos she finds Zeus apart from the others "retired at a distance" -a phrase used only of him and Achilles. The neardivine and excessive nature of Achilles' wrath is the blood
and heart of Zeus' plan, and Zeus, unlike Achilles, is the
mind of it; he is the guarantor of Achilles' glory. Zeus and
Achilles hold the tension of withdrawal throughout all the
mighty battles of the middle books. Only in furthering
Achilles' glory does Zeus stand apart from his family in
strife and threaten them, a parallel to Achilles' days in his
tent and his standing alone in his wrath even after the embassy of men closest to him. The difference between Zeus
and Achilles is the difference between the deathless one
and the death-haunted one. However alone Achilles is,
and however near to divinity he may be in his ruthlessness
and his wrath, he remains mortal. He is fallible at the moment of his greatest glory. The terror hidden behind Zeus'
nod of the head when he accedes to Thetis' petition, the
double-edged truth of his promise, lies all in Achilles' love
for Patroklos. The poet insists by the constant witness of
others on the lovable and gentle nature of Achilles' friend.
Briseis, the captured woman, bears most touching witness
to this in Book XIX. At the end of her lament for him she
says, "'Therefore I weep your death without ceasing. You
were kind always"' (XIX, 300). Greeks in a later age marvelled that Patroklos was older than Achilles, and yet so
beloved. Patroklos weeps for the fate of the other Achaians in front of Achilles, and Achilles' indecision in the face
of his friend leads him to give permission, the fatal permission to enter the battle, clad in the mighty armor of Achilles who loves him. This weakness of judgement is the beginning of the train of events which are sung of as the pit
48
of loneliness and detachment and ferocity. The irony of
his act is voiced by the poet in the unspeakable prayer of
Achilles to Zeus, Apollo, and Athene just before Patroklos'
departure:
"Father Zeus, Athene and Apollo, if only
not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, not one
of the Argives, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter
so that we two alone could break Troy's hallowed coronal."
[XVI, 97-100]
Zeus has not tricked Achilles, he has stood behind and
deepened what was already present. Achilles is better and
deeper and more terrifying and monstrous than other men
just as Zeus is first among the gods. Achilles' wrath and his
pride go beyond the human range, but his everlasting
memory remains because of Patroklos, because he is, as
are other mortals, dependent upon another.
The gods, and especially Zeus, may indeed foresee what
they foresee, but all there is for them to foresee are men's
actions. Zeus foresees Patroklos' death, but Achilles'
judgement is responsible for it, and he is the fount of his
own suffering. The gods are the unchanging look of the
present state of affairs, which is the perpetual state of affairs.
The hardest pill of all to swallow in the poet's fiction is
the role of the gods in the deaths of Patroklos and Hector.
Theirs are the most important deaths to the story, and
they are the most touching and lovable of the heroes. Both
men are tricked by the gods, and at the end, defenseless,
they are slaughtered like pigs. Patroklos, dying, foresees
mighty Hector's death, and when that death comes in the
story the hero, again defenseless, tricked by Athene after
his nightmare run around the walls of Troy, falls. What is
the intent of the poet in presenting the deaths of these
two heroes in such a manner? The full weight of the meaning has to be faced and grappled with. The poem is peopled with heroes who gain their glory in battle and who
exhibit and are praised for their courage in mortal combat.
Their courage cannot consist in merely killing-that
would be bestial. Their excellence must consist in seeing
what death in battle is like and then facing it. The truth, as
presented by Homer in these scenes, with all the help of
the apparatus of Apollo's and Athcne's intervention, is
that the moment of defeat is the end of the story and the
story must end in defenselessness:
"No, deadly destiny, with the son of Leta, has killed me,
and of men it was Euphorbos; you are only my third slayer."
[XVI, 849-50]
says Patroklos to Hector. Hector, dying, says to Achilles:
"Be careful now; for I might be made into the god's curse
upon you on that day when Paris and Phoibos Apollo
destroy you in the Skaian gates, for all your valor."
[XXII, 358-60]
SUMMER 1983
�Achilles, the clearest seer of all, answers him:
'
"Die: and I will take my own death at whatever time
Zeus and the rest of the immortals choose to accomplish it."
is robbed by a small weakling, both should lie. Our ordinary daily life and our daily reading are enmeshed in a web
of rhetoric: our arguments, our constant justifications, the
man or of a cause. Aristotle in his book on rhetoric illus-
speeches we listen to, the sermons we attend to, the daily
editorial page, the puny talk of personalities that waver in
front of our eyes in the penumbra of our TV sets. As probable stories are the bread and butter of our daily existence,
Aristotle intends to exhibit a whole side of our being in his
rhetorical treatise. When in the Poetics he finds poetry
more philosophical than history, he intends to say that poetry is more general; but nearly in the same breath he observes that the poetic story must be probable, must be believable, or no one would be caught by it. We have insisted
that the Iliad is not rhetoric, but we must also insist that it
share with rhetoric the probability of its stories. Nothing
will work unless it appears probable. The enormous difference is that in the Iliad we begin with the story and end up
with the man, whereas in rhetoric we begin with the
man in the dock and then proceed to a probable story in
order to justify or accuse the prisoner. That is why it is possible to talk of an Achilles or an Ajax or of a David the
King, while it is so offensive to talk of a Napoleon or a
Michelangelo or an Alcibiades. Alcibiades and Napoleon
did particular things, and any historian who is not merely a
chronicler will argue about their doings after the fact of
the Battle of Waterloo or the Syracusan expedition, although he will falsify if he makes his account a necessary
and inevitable story. Waterloo could have been avoided,
and Alcibiades might well have taken Syracuse if he had
not gotten drunk on a certain evening in Athens. The poet
is under no such restraint. l-Ie tells stories that could happen, stories that arc truly probable and that unfold inexorably. Such a nexus of inevitability is the heart and soul of
fiction; it gives it its generality and its truth. It is like the
view of the gods from Olympos as they watch the plain of
Troy. It is what the word fate means in the poem. It is
what makes Homer's Iliad or true fiction in general applicable to the whole of things, and it is what takes such poems and books out the the realm of rhetoric and away from
the dreary round of one thing after another, and away
from the endless talk of justifying and accusing, buying
and selling, all under the whip of power and self-love.
Many have regarded the Iliad as if it were the Gorgon's
head~something too fraught with terror, too harsh and
grim, to be accepted as true and primary. It is easier to consider it merely as the first book to be met with, and to think
that later books will somehow deal with it, employing it as
the opening gambit in a long history of dialectical opposites, or to assume that somehow philosophy will have certain consolations which can soften or deal with the greatness and monstrosity of Achilles. I would propose, in
concluding this lecture, that we consider it both first and
primary among all books which the listener is acquainted
with. That Achilles is first and primary in the poem is reflected in the whole sophisticated structure of the work.
trates a side of this by noting that when a large, strong man
He is first in courage, truthfulness, strength, beauty, ter-
[XXII, 365-66]
Courage is defined by seeing and facing such moments in
the imagination, even before they happen, and understanding that the gods are no help at the end. When one
man kills another in battle, the one killed has nowhere to
turn; the end is slaughter. The gods at such a moment are
merely the bright noonday sun beating down upon the
deadly killing place in the space between the city and the
ships.
It is only at the end of this lecture that the most important and revealing aspects of the Iliad's truth-telling
emerge. An entry into this last consideration of the poem
will be to say what the poem is, and what the poem is not.
It is a story, but it is not rhetoric; no appearances are saved.
It is a fiction which exposes things, and its exposition is
never an apology or an argument or a hypothesis. Milton,
great arguer and lawyer, and also great poet, calls upon his
muse in these words:
... what is in me dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
[Paradise Lost, I, 22-26]
Milton intends to be an advocate and to save his client by
means of his poem. There is nothing to be saved in the
Iliad, only something to be seen. Certainly we listeners
may argue for all generations about Achilles, but Homer
has done his job when he has told his story, and he is vastly
uninterested in dialectic.
The truth of the name Achilles is the story of Achilles,
and the story is not rhetorical. We don't see the heroes until they act, and they act in a story that is composed, that is
a fiction composed by Homer. The story of Achilles is not
like a story delivered in court by a lawyer in defense of his
client. Achilles is not on trial. The story is not a probable
fiction after the existent fact of Achilles sitting in the dock
of justice. It is not history either, although that the Trojan
war was fought and that Achilles may have been there
lends credibility to the fiction. In a trial both the prosecuting and the defense lawyers will try with all their art to tell
a probable story about the man in the dock, a story which
will support or lend credence to an action already committed. The man on trial is accused of some crime, and a probable story or account of his actions will give an appearance
of truth to his guilt or to his innocence. This is the essential use of rhetoric: to tell a probable story in defense of a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
49
�ror, and friendship. He demands and receives more glory
than any other hero, and loses what· he cherishes most at
the moment that he is glorified by the gods. After Patroklos' death he is not present on the scene as other men
are. His loneliness and wrath then have a detachment and
ferocity beyond all ordinary human bounds. Yau will recall
what he says to the boy he slaughters by the river. After
Patroklos' death he eats no human food until he sups with
Priam in Book XXIV. He is both great and monstrous, a
disturbing fact which piety would have be otherwise. He
manages the funeral games with perspicuity and tact, seeing all the heroes for what they are, and even awarding
Agamemnon a prize while refraining from asking him to
compete. When he and Priam look at each other and admire each other, they both see things with a clarity born of
suffering and passion, and Priam kisses the man-killing
hands of Achilles, the hands that killed his son, and Achilles lifts the body of Hector into the smooth-rolling cart.
There is no conversion or turning around of Achilles in
Book XXIV; he quietly and simply sees steadily and truly
with no illusions. He will fight again and die, and so will
Priam, and the world is as it is, and nothing will change. He
sees as a god sees, but remains a mortal. At the same time,
Achilles' primacy in the poem in no way impugns the
other heroes; in particular the civilization of the poem
makes Hector and Priam figures that one cherishes, and
even loves. Both of them are men one would choose to live
with in a city, or in the arena of political life. There is no
Goliath or Satan or Turnus in this story. Ajax is a paradigm
of strength and courage and fidelity, and his name remains
with us as such. Odysseus is better at counsel than Achilles. Diomedes has his incomparable day of glory. Nestor's
loquaciousness is the virtue of his age, and there is wisdom
in stopping action to listen to the past, though it be tedious
at times.
The proposition that I proposed submits that the poem
50
itself has the same kind of primacy among all the books
you read that Achilles has in the poem. I do not intend this
merely historically, although it is perfectly clear that the
book has an enormous importance in its chronological
firstness. How marvelous it would be to have Alexander
the Great's copy of the Iliad as edited by his teacher Aristotle. Rome's greatest poet, Virgil, had to face the Iliad as
if it were the Gorgon's head. Plato had to tame Achilles,
and face down the truth of the poem and the power of its
beauty. Homer is like an ever-present star on the horizon
for Dante and Milton. All of the above mentioned facts
from the history of literature and philosophy are so, but
the primacy of the Iliad lies in its perennial freshness and
truth. It is about what impinges most importantly on anyone, if he will but look around. There are other books one
might choose if he were running a city, as one might prefer
Hector to Achilles in running a city hall or state. There are
other books which have the sagacity and lie-telling abilities
of Odysseus, and there are many Nestor-like books of prudence, full of memory. The Iliad does not eliminate these
books any more than Achilles blots out the greatness of the
other heroes. For us in this eccentric little college, it is
rightfully the first book. Philosophy must come after.
It may have seemed trivial in matters of such importance to have talked so long about nouns, proper names,
similes, and story telling, and it is probably not consistent
with the spirit and greatness of the Iliad to be arguing in its
behalf. Homer has no ax to grind, no thesis to prove, and
the thunder of Zeus would strike him dead if he tried to
solve any problems. He is like a roving camera eye or an
omnipresent eagle, and only Shakespeare can match his
impartiality. In his poem the sun is always high noon, and
the angle of its light is a right angle. The virtues commensurate with its seeing are courage and truth-telling, and the
primacy of the poem shows that these indeed are the true
human excellences.
SUMMER 1983
�The Supreme Court and School
Desegregation: Brown v. Board of
Education Reconsidered
Murray Dry
I
"We conclude that in the field of public education the
doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." So wrote Mr.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, for a unanimous court in Brown
v. Board of Education, 1 the school segregation case, which
was decided on May 17, 1954. In his definitive history of
this case, Richard Kluger explained that "all the Supreme
Court had truly and at long last granted to the black man
was simple justice."
Now the law says that, like them or not, white America may
not humiliate colored Americans by setting them apart. Now
the law says that black Americans must not be degraded by
the state and their degradation used as an excuse to drive
them further down. 2
This apparently simple case has been surrounded by notoriety and controversy from the day it was decided. james
Reston reacted to the Court's reliance on social science evidence to establish the inherent inequality of segregation
with a day-after column in The New York Times entitled,
"A Sociological Decision: Court Founded its Segregation
Ruling on Hearts and Minds rather than Laws." Reston
said of the Court's work that it read "more like an expert
paper on sociology than a Supreme Court opinion"; it "rejected history, philosophy, and custom as the major basis
Murray Dry teaches political philosophy, American constitutional law,
and American political thought at Middlebury College (Vermont), where
he is a professor in the Department of Political Science. He has published work on the separation of powers, Congress, and the congressional
veto.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
for its decision and accepted instead justice Benjamin N.
Cardoza[sic]'s test of contemporary social justice." 3 Over
the years the meaning of the case was extended far beyond
its original legal scope. The Times, in its editorial on the
tenth anniversary of Brown, described the decision as ''significantly broaden[ing] the role of the judiciary in the defense of human rights."
How swiftly will we complete the arsenal of laws required to
provide effective safeguards against racial discrimination?
And, more fundamentally still, how fully, how peacefully, and
how fast will be accomplished the transformation of attitudes
necessary to make equality real and in every community
North and South?4
The expanding expectation from school desegregation to
the elimination of all racial discrimination to a broader
transformation of attitudes was repeated in the Times in
its extensive reporting on the twentieth anniversary of
Brown, but this time with a note of scepticism.
The question is whether the momentum generated by the activities of the last twenty years has set in motion an irreversible process which will almost automatically lead to racial justice in this country, as some whites seem to think, or whether,
as most blacks hold, the largest and hardest job is yet to be
done, and whites have quit the game before the first quarter
has even ended. 5
Other twenty-year appraisals of Brown revealed disagreement on its accomplishments. A black dentist from
Mississippi was quoted as saying: "We have accomplished
things in the past few years that I thought it might take
decades to achieve. Some of this is a result of white recog-
51
�nition of black voting power, but a lot of white people here
have had a change of heart." Black leaders Bayard Rustin,
Robert S. Browne, and Roy Wilkins expressed concern
about the gap between educated and uneducated blacks
and emphasized the need for more political and economic
power.
By 1974, if not the most surprising, perhaps the most
disturbing result of the school desegregation decisions,
and one requiring most serious consideration, was the phe-
nomenon of ~(white flight" in Northern metropolitan
school districts. Kenneth Clark, the black psychologist
whose studies on black children's self perceptions were
used by the NAACP in its litigation, and which were cited
by the Supreme Court, said: "the whole morality issue of
the school desegregation issue disappeared when it moved
North,"6 meaning support for the decision eroded as its
consequences were felt by Northern whites. Another ex·
planation for the condition of Northern metropolitan
school systems referred to "the hard facts of demography,
ethnicity, and the inexorable flux of human migration." 7
Alexander Bickel, late constitutional law scholar and
professor at Yale Law School, who was involved in the
original Brown decision as a clerk for justice Frankfurter,
supported the latter view in the New Republic in 1970.
Distinguishing desegregation, as the dismantling of dual
school systems, from actual integration, Bickel explained
how the combination of private schools plus racially sepa·
"Schools are socializing institutions. They arc the only in·
stitutions where all children are required to do so [sic]. If
we cannot desegregate education, I don't think we can de·
segregate anything." On the other hand, Constance Baker
Motley, who represented )ames Meredith in his bid to de·
segregate the University of Mississippi and who was a fed·
era] judge in 1974, said:
It seems today Brown has little practical relevance to central
city blacks. Its psychological and legal relevance has already
had its effect. Central city blacks seem more concerned now
with the political and economic power accruing from the new
black concentrations than they do with busing to effect
school desegregation. 11
Whichever explanation of "white flight" is preferred
and however one views the educational results, the num-
bers show more black elementary and secondary school
pupils in majority white schools in the South than in the
North or the border states in 1974. In the District of Columbia, the school system had become virtually all black
and the brightest black students had also left the public
schools .I'
Meanwhile, as the Supreme Court decided its first met·
ropolitan school district implementation cases-Char·
lotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina in 1971 and Denver,
Colorado, in 1973 13 -controversy over judicial power in-
areas permitted all but poor whites to flee from public
schools affected by court-ordered integration schemes. He
also noted that government and its intended beneficiaries
tensified. In the first case, the Court upheld a district
court order for dismantling a dual school system which in·
cluded busing pupils to approach a racial balance guideline. Because this decision disregarded the provision of ti·
tie IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act defining desegregation
were at cross purposes: while the court and HEW were re-
as the assignment of pupils without regard to race, and ex-
zoning and pairing Southern schools to integrate them,
black leaders in Northern cities were trying to decentralize
come racial imbalance, it produced numerous Congressio-
rated residential patterns in mainly northern metropolitan
plicitly prohibiting the assignment of students to over·
school systems to gain community control. 8
nal proposals to restrict the Supreme Court's jurisdiction
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission took a very different
view of the Brown mandate. In the conclusion to its 1976
Report, the Commission acknowledged no distinction be·
tween integration and desegregation, denied that the
courts were eliminating anything other than de jure segregation, denied that pupil assignment for racial balance had
become the Brown mandate, and simply affirmed the con·
stitutional right to equal educational opportunity. The dif·
ficulty with this formulation was that while it denied that
desegregation had become a mandate for racial balance in
the public schools, its only test of the extent of desegrega·
over school desegregation cases. In the second case, the
tion in the nation's schools was numerical.9
The different views about the Brown mandate in the
1970s reflected different views of education. The Coleman Report on Equal Educational Opportunity 10 ques·
tioned the link between integration and educational
achievement. The Civil Rights Commission and scholars
who rejected the Coleman Report viewed integrated
Supreme Court upheld a district court order to institute
a district-wide remedy-involving pupil assignment
throughout the district for racial balance-on the basis of a
finding of segregative intent by the school board in one
part of the district, notwithstanding the absence of any
history of a dual school system. This case produced the
first dissent, that by justice Rchnquist, and every major
desegregation case thereafter has produced a divided
Court.
As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education, the confusion over its mandate and
the extent to which it has been fulfilled, controversy over
the actions of the Supreme Court and federal district
courts, and concerns over education have not abated. The
Supreme Court is still finding racially segregated systems
that have not been dismantled, the federal government is
still bringing suits for desegregation, and Congress is still
schooling as a socializing experience essential for racial
trying to restrict the courts' powers to order busing for ra-
harmony in the United States. The Supreme Court ex·
pressed this view in its Brown opinion, and the Staff Direc·
tor of the Civil Rights Commission reaffirmed it in 1974:
cial balance. In addition, the gap between the educational
52
achievements of blacks and whites has not been narrowed,
and the National Commission on Excellence in Education
SUMMER 1983
�has recently issued a report arguing that "the educational
foundations of our society arc presently being eroded by a
rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a
nation and a people." 14
To mark the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of Brown, I
propose a reconsideration of the Supreme Court's opinion
in the school desegregation cases. I do this for two related
reasons: the importance of the issues in the original cases
and the connection between the opinion handed down
and the subsequent controversy over the case. I shall argue
that Brown was a great but flawed judicial achievement
and that the flaws were avoidable and have made a great
political task even more difficult. The flaws concern the
following topics: (1) the exercise of judicial review, especially in light of problematic constitutional history and
precedents which must be overruled; (2) the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation and the importance
of the distinction for American government; and (3) the
meaning of education in America. My argument will show
that the treatment of precedents and principles was weak;
that the use of social science data unwittingly led to a confusion about the de facto/de jure distinction; and that the
Court accepted a flabby view of education which concealed different and often conflicting educational purposes. My reconsideration will proceed in the following order: the 14th amendment and the precedents, the cases
and the opinions, scholars' commentary, and finally a revised opinion.
II
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United
States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall
make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdic·
tion the equal protection of the law. [14th Amendment, section 1]
The 14th Amendment and the Precedents
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers who represented the litigants in the segregation cases faced two constitutional challenges: first, nothing in the language of the
14th amendment clearly prohibited school segregation,
and study of the Congressional debates surrounding the
amendment's ratification revealed lack of clarity at best
and no intention to prohibit school segregation at worst;
second, in 1896, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson,
upheld a Louisiana statute providing "equal but separate"
accommodations on intrastate rail cars, on the grounds
that the law treated both races equally and the regulation
was reasonable in light of the customs of the people. The
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
alternative position was stated by the sole dissenter, Justice John Harlan, Sr., who argued that the intention of the
Civil War amendments was to remove the race line from
government. The most moving formulation of this position goes: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither
knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of
civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law."l5 This
was an interpretation of the 13th and 14th amendments,
since the languages of the 13th was explicit only about
slavery or involuntary servitude-and it was stretching the
latter term to argue that segregation laws were includedand the 14th amendment made no reference to race. Still,
it was generally conceded that the purpose of the 14th
amendment was to protect the newly freed race against
discrimination in its civil rights. Furthermore, in an earlier
case, Strauder v. West Virginia, decided in 1880, the Supreme Court invalidated a law which excluded Negroes
from serving on juries in sweeping language which Harlan
was able to quote in support of his argument in Plessy.
The words of the amendment, it is true, are prohibitory, but
they contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity,
or right, to exemption from unfriendly legislation against
them distinctively as colored-exemption from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, lessening the se·
curity of their enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy,
and discriminations which are steps towards reducing them
to the condition of a subject race.l6
In the majority opinion in Plessy, Justice Brown narrowed the reach of the Strauder precedent by distinguishing between political and civil rights, which included the
right to serve on juries and, presumably, the right to vote
and the right to sue to make contracts, and social equality,
such as a right to be free from enforced segregation in
places of public accommodations. The Plessy majority's
position did have something in its favor, even though, as I
shall argue later, Justice Harlan's position stated the American standard and the deeper truth of the matter. Justice
Brown cited a Massachusetts case upholding segregated
schools and an Indiana case upholding laws forbidding intermarriage. While these cases were decided before the
14th amendment, it is doubtful that the framers of that
amendment intended their work to invalidate such laws.
Even the government's friend of the court brief in Brown,
which supported the litigants, acknowledged this:
In 1868 public schools had been hardly begun in many states
and were still in their infancy. School attendance was, as a
general matter, not compulsory. The Negroes had just been
released from bondage and were generally illiterate, poor and
retarded socially and culturally. To educate them in the same
classes and schools as white children may have been regarded
as entirely impracticable. 17
Stare decisis refers to the doctrine of following previous
decisions where the law is settled, in order to maintain stability and respect for the law. But this is not sufficient,
since the 14th amendment did intervene between the ear-
53
�lier state decisions and Plessy and the language did permit
the interpretation offered by the Court in Strauder and
urged by Harlan in dessent in Plessy.
A second defense of the Plessy opinion can be offered.
Given the deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, the recollections by the blacks of the injuries sustained, the natural
differences which a change of law does not eradicate, the
deep apprehension of Southern whites about racial comingling, as well as the actual condition of most of the newly
freed negroes, a case can surely be made for the reasonableness, apart from the wisdom, of enforced segregation
in public accommodations at that time. We shall return to
this topic,l8
The Court faced the following alternatives as it studied
the briefs and prepared for oral argument in Brown and
the companion cases: (1) to affirm the decisions of the
lower courts on the authority of Plessy; (2) to reverse the
lower courts without overturning Plessy, on the grounds
that the school conditions were not in fact equal and could
not be equalized with racial segregation; (3) to reverse the
lower courts and strike down segregation, by finding Plessy
no longer applicable in the field of education; or (4) toreverse the lower courts, strike down segregation, and repu·
diate Plessy as wrong then and wrong now.
Counsel for the states with segregated schools took the
first position; counsel for the challenging students and parents alternated between the second and the third positions; and the Supreme Court, in its first consideration of
the case, alternated between the first and third positions
and then, when it decided to overturn school segregation,
settled on the third position.l9
Two Supreme Court decisions involving segregation in
higher education had eroded the force of Plessy and also
permitted the NAACP lawyers and the government, in its
amicus brief, to argue that Plessy did not have to be overturned to invalidate school segregation. In Missouri ex rei.
Gaines v. Canada, decided in 1938, the Supreme Court invalidated a law which provided for state funding to send
qualified Negro law students to law schools in any neighboring state and ordered the petitioner admitted to the law
school at the State University of Missouri.
By the operation of the laws of Missouri a privilege has been
created for white law students which is denied to negroes by
reason of their race. The white resident is afforded legal education within the State; the negro resident having the same
qualifications is refused it there and must go outside the State
to obtain it. That is a denial of the equality oflegal right to the
enjoyment of the privilege which the State has set up, and the
provision for the payment of tuition fees in another State
does not remove the discrimination.20
Oklahoma had a similar law which was challenged by a Negro who had applied to the state's university for a doctorate in education. After the Gaines decision, Oklahoma
amended its statute to provide for admission of Negroes to
the university, but on a segregated basis. This meant sit-
54
ting at a special desk in a designated area, in classes, in the
library and in the cafeteria. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma
State Regents, 21 decided in 1950, the Supreme Court
found such state-imposed restrictions productive of inequality of educational opportunity and hence a violation
of equal protection of the laws. In a third related case, decided the same day as McLaurin, the Supreme Court invalidated Texas's provision for a separate in-state law school
for Negroes and ordered petitioner admitted to the University of Texas law school, to which he had applied for
admission. In Sweatt v. Painter, the Court took note of the
inequality in number of faculty, variety of courses, etc.
when comparing the University of Texas law school with
Texas State University for Negroes, and then it added:
What is more important, the University of Texas law school
possesses to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law schooL Such qualities, to name but a few,
include reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the
community, traditions and prestige.22
Hence both the Court's previous cases and its hesitancy to
argue that the South had been acting unconstitutionally
for nearly sixty years led it to address the constitutional
question presented by Brown in terms of the effect of segregation itself on public education.
The Cases and the Arguments
The Brown cases were five in number and they were divided into the state cases, which came from Kansas, South
Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, and the federal case,
from the District of Columbia. The cases were first argued
in December 1952 and then, when reargument was called
for-ostensibly to hear more about the 14th amendment
but also to give justive Frankfurter time to get a unanimous Court decision against segregation 23 -they were reargued in December 1954. Two separate unanimous opinions of the Court were handed down on May 17, 1954:
Brown v. Board of Education et al., which included all four
state cases, and Bolling v. Sharpe, which covered the District of Columbia. The constitutional issue was the same
in all cases and the lower court treatments had all followed
Plessy. In the South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott) and Virginia
(Davis v. County School Board) cases, the three-judge district courts found inequality in facilities but sustained the
state provisions for segregation and ordered equalization.
In Delaware (Gebhard v. Belton), the Delaware Court of
Chancery found inequality and ordered the plaintiffs admitted to the previously all-white schools, but indicated
that the State could obtain a modification of the order after equalization. In Brown, the Kansas case, the three
judge district court denied relief since the facilities were
equal, but it did find that "segregation in public education
SUMMER 1983
�has a detrimental effect upon Negro children."24 In the
District of Columbia (Bolling v. Sharpe), the district court
dismissed the complaint. 25
The two opinions, Brown and Bolling, came to the same
result in different ways. This may have been due, in part,
to the different lawyers arguing the cases for the plain·
tiffs 26 and, in part, to the different constitutional provisions. The state cases involved the 14th amendment's
equal protection clauses; the federal case came under the
5th amendment, which addresses Congress and has no
equal protection clause. Since it was not surprising to have
the same result for the District as for the state, it was not
surprising for the Court to use the due process clause,
which is also in the 14th amendment, to fashion the same
result as it did with the equal protection clause. Yet the
argument in Bolling was not only different, it was closer to
Harlan's Plessy dissent, it did not rely on social science
data, and it would not have lent itself to expansion the way
the Brown decision did. I shall first examine the major
Brown opinion, noting the sources of controversy and confusion; then I shall turn to Bolling v. Sharpe.
The order of topics in this brief opinion is: the intention
of the framers of the 14th amendment; the relevant prece·
dents since Plessy; the importance of education today; the
reason why segregation on the basis of race in public
schools is necessarily unequal; the conclusion, or holding,
that the plaintiffs and others who were similarly situated
are denied equal protection of the laws; and, finally, a call
for reargument on the implementation question, so that
the Court "may have the full assistance of the parties in
formulating decrees."27
On the first point, the Court argued that study of the
ratification of the 14th amendment yielded inconclusive
results for the question of school segregation. It buttressed
this contention with the reminder that free public educa·
tion was just beginning in 1868. While the school case
precedents, discussed above, had not overturned Plessy,
they did permit the Court to argue that equal protection
of the laws involved more than the tangible factors of
education, such as classroom facilities and number of
teachers. 28
The Court proceeded to describe education in 1954 as
"perhaps the most important function of state and local
governments," as ''the very foundation of good citizenship," and as "a principal instrument in awakening the
child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to
his environment." With that out of the way, the Court
asked: "Does segregation of children in public schools
solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facili·
ties and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the
children of the minority group of equal educational oppor·
tunity?" Its immediate answer, and it was only here in the
reading of the opinion that Chief Justice Warren tipped
his hand and let the participants and spectators know what
the Court had decided, was: "We believe that it does."29
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The critical argument concerning the effect of segrega·
lion on education is first stated by the Court in its own
words and then the words of the lower court in the Kansas
case.
To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their
hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The
effect of this separation on their educational opportunities
was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court
which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro
plaintiffs:
~<Segregation of white and colored children in public
schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.
The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for
the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with
the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the
educational and mental development of negro children and
to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in
a racialQy] integrated school system."lO
The argument is in two steps: first, racial segregation
generates a feeling of inferiority; and, second, this will af·
feet the hearts and minds of the Negro children in a man·
ner that will significantly impair their ability to learn.
In the first sentence, the infinitive "to separate" is the
subject, and it clearly refers to a separating agent, i.e., the
school board on the direction of the state legislature. In
the passage quoted from the district court, however, segre·
galion is said to have a greater impact when it has the force
of law. This implies, however, that it has some impact, and
a harmful one, in terms of feelings of self-worth and hence
motivation to learn, even without the force of law. This
must refer to de facto, or actual, segregation. This is the
basis, in the Brown opinion, for the extension of the Brown
holding from the prohibition of de iure segregation to the
prohibition of de facto segregation.
People have disagreed on what Brown required and
whether its mandate has been carried out because the core
holding, or rule of law, outlawed de iure segregation, but
the dicta implicated de facto segregation. The debate over
busing is a debate over whether Brown and the subsequent
cases stand for the proposition that schools should be de·
segregated, that is, made free of positive acts of segregation by public officials, or whether schools should be
integrated, regardless of what the cause of the actual segre·
galion may be.
The Supreme Court supported its argument by asserting that notwithstanding the extent of psychological
knowledge at the time of Plessy, its finding was "amply
supported by modern authority." Its citationll began with
the work of Dr. Kenneth Clark, who had conducted atti·
tude tests on Negro children using black and white dolls;
he testified at the trial in the South Carolina case. NAACP
55
�lawyer Jack Greenberg was quoted as saying that "the
main function of the social science testimony was to help
the courts~and especially the Supreme Court~convey
the confidence of its common sense perceptions of what
the nation knew about right and wrong in this regard."l2
The inclusion of Clark's doll studies reveals that modern
social science is not always a sound vehicle for proving the
soundness of common sense knowledge. Clark's studies
have been subject to extensive criticism, covering the ef
feet of the interview situation on the children and the lim·
ited number of cases. In addition, the one test which com·
pared responses from Northern and Southern negro
children, and hence had some direct applicability to school
segregation, conflicted with the intended thesis. There
were eight questions to the test; one asked the children to
pick the doll which resembled them. The Northern Negro
children identified themselves with the white doll m
greater proportion than the Southern children, 39% to
29%. 33 This hardly proved the psychological harm of
school segregation.
Even if the dubious Clark tests are omitted, however, it
does seem odd that psychological findings should be the
basis for striking down a Supreme Court precedent and
establishing a new constitutional right, that of equal educational opportunity. Suppose subsequent perception
tests revealed, as some did, 34 that Negro children suffered
from greater doubts about their own worth in integrated
schools? One can well imagine how, under certain circum-
stances, this could occur; would that justify segregation?
The social scientists were not altogether responsible for
the extensiveness of the Court's findings, however. The
Supreme Court apparently accepted uncritically the finding of fact of district judge Walter A. Huxman, a finding
that changed the emphasis from the original formulation
presented by the expert witness in his court. Huxrnan
started with the finding that segregation had a detrimental
effect on Negro children; then he found that detrimental
effect to be greater when it had the sanction of law. The
source of this finding was the testimony of Louise
Pinkham Holt, an assistant professor in the psychology de-
parison to private discrimination and turned it into a major
premise. I do not wish to suggest that a more accurate
treatment of the expert testimony in the Kansas case
would have made all the difference for the development of
the Brown mandate and the popular acceptance of the decision, but the extended claim, unsupported by evidence
and not nearly so common-sensical as the case against government-enforced segregation, surely lent itself to confusion over the meaning of desegregation and charges of bad
faith.
Let us return to the second school desegregation opinion, Bolling v. Sharpe. Chief Justice Warren began by noting that equal protection and due process, while not identical, both stem "from our ideal of fairness." Arguing that
some discrimination "may be so unjustifiable as to be vio-
lative of due process," Warren proceeded to attack ra.cial
classifications as "contrary to our traditions" and hence
"constitutionally suspect." This put the burden of proof
on the government to justify the regulation, as opposed to
making the complaining party prove that a constitutional
right had been violated. The meaning of "liberty" in the
due process clause was defined as extending to "the full
range of conduct which the individual is free to pursue,"
which cannot be restricted without a proper governmental
objective. Warren then concluded, again for a unanimous
Court, that usegregation in public education is not reason-
ably related to any proper governmental objective, and
thus it imposed on Negro children of the District of Columbia a burden that constitutes an arbitrary deprivation
of their liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause."36
This argument focuses on the government's action and is,
therefore, applicable to government-enforced segregation
only.
The line of argument in Bolling v. Sharpe has been used
in subsequent cases involving race classification; a suspect
classification, such as race, alienage, or national origin,
triggers a strict scrutinizing of the governmental action.
While it resembles Harlan's argument that the Constitution is color-blind, it does not rule out the possibility of justifying racial classifications in special circumstances, such
partment at Kansas University. In answer to the question,
as, for example, affirmative action. It has not been promi-
"[D]oes enforced legal separation have any adverse effect
upon the personality development of the Negro child?"
she replied.
nent in subsequent school desegregation cases, however,
where the focus has been on the dismantling of dual
school systems and the determination of a segregative act
on the part of a school board, even where segregation was
The fact that it is enforced, that it is legal, I think, has more
importance than the mere fact of segregation by itself does
because this gives legal and official sanction to a policy which
is inevitably interpreted both by white people and by Negroes
as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. Were it not for
the sense that one group is inferior to the other, there would
be no basis-and I am not granting that this is a rational basis-for such segregation.35
The fact is that the expert witness was focusing on state
enforced segregation; the judge picked up a casual com-
56
not required by state law, as it was in the Southern states.
Scholars' Commentary
Criticism of the Court's opinion focused on the intention of the 14th amendment, the principle of stare decisis,
and the dubious character of the social science evidence.
In his famous critique, Herbert Wechsler argued that
while school segregation was wrong and it was desirable to
end it, the constitutional basis for the Supreme Court's
SUMMER l983
�taking the initiative in the matter was dubious 37 Wechsler
found the social science argument unimpressive and
doubted that the Court's judgment truly rested on that basis. He thought the judgment "must have rested on the
view that racial segregation is, in principle, a denial of
equality to the minority against whom it is directed; that is,
the group that is not dominant politically and, therefore,
does not make the choice involved." But he found this argument inadequate as the basis for a decision based on
"neutral principles/' that is, "based on reasons that in
their generality and their neutrality transcend any immediate result that is involved." It seemed to him to "involve
an inquiry into the motive of the legislature, which is generally foreclosed to the courts." He thought there was
something to the Court's Plessy statement that, since the
law spoke of equality, the badge of inferiority was in the
eye of the beholder. To Wechsler, the issue in the case was
not equal protection, but freedom to associate under the
due process clause, and the challenge was to explain why
one desire for association should overrule another desire
for disassociation.
Wechsler was not satisfied with the reason he attributed
to the Supreme Court, because he regarded it as "a choice
among competing values or desires," which lay in the
realm of mere fiat and was, therefore, inappropriate for a
judicial argument. The only exceptions to this position
were "values that can reasonably be asserted to have constitutional dimension";3 8 what they are Wechsler did not
say, and if asked why they do not include prohibition
on race classification, he probably would have referred to
history.
The responses to Wechsler's challenge to justify the
constitutional basis for the Brown opinion have tended to
reaffirm the inappropriateness of race classifications or to
specify what jim Crow legislation meant in fact. Both
Louis Pollack and Charles Black cited C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow to the effect that
such laws "were constantly pushing the Negro further
down." On the question whether "separate but equal" can
really be equal, Pollack concluded "that the constitutional
doubts instantly generated by statutes drawing racial lines
have not been allayed."l9 And Black, whose treatment of
historical examples is fuller, responded this way:
Equality, like all general concepts, has marginal areas where
philosophic difficulties are encountered. But if a whole race
of people finds itself confined within a system which is set up
and continued for the very purpose of keeping it in an inferior
station and if the question is then solemnly propounded
whether such a race is being treated 'equally,' I think we
ought to exercise one of the sovereign premgatives of philosophers-that of laughter40
Both scholars may be right, but neither presents a full argument in support of his position.
A further defense of Brown comes from Alexander
Bickel, who took issue with Wechsler's claim that courts
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
should not attempt to settle value questions. Drawing on
his study of Lincoln, Bickel argued that "the constitutional function of the Court is to define values and proclaim principles," and "it is at the heart of the utility of
such a process to proclaim the absolute principle that race
is not an allowable criterion for legislative classification." 41
For the source of that principle, we need to consider his
discussion of judicial review. In the first chapter of The
Least Dangerous Branch, Bickel makes the distinction,
which is not explained, between "immediate material
needs" and "certain enduring values." Then, he says that
"our system ... like all secular systems, calls for the evolution of principle in novel circumstances," and he continues by asserting that the most fundamental principle of
American government is the rule of the people 42 It seems
that for Bickel the character of our democratic government is very much open to chance, that is, to the changing
needs of a persistent majority. If that is the case, it is very
hard to understand how the Supreme Court, which possesses only the judicial power, should be permitted to take
the lead, as it did, in the matter of school segregation.
Bickel's explicit justification for this action reflects his
notion of a Constitution whose very principles, and not
merely their application, evolve. This notion is worthy of
consideration not only for its own merits, but because it
forms a part of Bickel's defense of Brown, and this defense
is based on a study which assisted the Supreme Court in
its deliberations. As one of justice Frankfurter's law clerks
during the 1952 term, Bickel was asked to study the history
of the 14th amendment in order to determine the lawmakers' intent on the school segregation issue. Frankfurter circulated the memo which resulted from Bickel's
year-long study to the other )ustices 43 Bickel later published a revised version of this memo in the Harvard Law
Review in 1955. In that article, Bickel concluded that while
a general grant of legislative authority would not have
passed Congress, and hence one cannot say that the framers intended to outlaw segregation, still:
May it not be that the Ivloderates and the Radicals reached a
compromise permitting them to go to the country with language which they could, where necessary, defend against
damaging alarms raised by the opposition, but which at the
same time was sufficiently elastic to permit reasonable future
advances?
Acknowledging that the framers of the 14th amendment
did not compare to the framers of the Constitution, Bickel
nonetheless attributed to them "an awareness ... that it
was a constitution they were writing, which led to a choice
of language capable of growth." 44 We learn from Kluger
that Bickel acknowledged in his notes to Frankfurter that
such was a "charitable view of the sloppy draftsmen of the
Fourteenth Amendment." 45
Bickel's view of constitutional construction was shared
by Frankfurter and possibly by other members of the
Court. To some extent it follows Chief justice john Mar-
57
�shall's famous account of constitutional construction in
McCulloch v. Maryland, but with 'a substantial revision.
Faced with the question whether Congress should insti·
tute a bank, notwithstanding the absence of any specific
authorization in the Constitution's enumeration oflegisla·
tive powers, Marshall distinguished constitutions from
statutes. Because a legal code is prolix and a constitution,
which is to be understood by the public, only marks great
outlines, ''we must never forget that it is a constitution we
Negro slaves in the Southern states, but it was not incon·
sistent with the Declaration of Independence.
Second, American government was understood to be re-
The place to start is with Harlan's argument that the
Constitution is color-blind. While he may have been
publican, as distinct from the limited monarchy of Great
Britain. The framers' views on qualifications for voting
and office-holding reflected support for popular govern·
ment. Consequently, we can conclude that any legally·
based class structure, while not necessarily inconsistent
with natural right, was not consistent with the form of gov·
ernment appropriate for America. Therefore, there can
only be one class of citizenship recognized by American
law. How could America move from a condition of slavery
in the land of freedom to equal citizenship for the newly
freed race? The task seemed impossible to Tocqueville,
when he observed the condition of the races in America in
the 1830s49 After the Civil War, however, colonization
was out, and the only question was, how to bring the newly
freed race up to full citizenship. We are now at the prob·
!em of Plessy v. Ferguson. In light of what has been said,
the issue in the case may be described as follows: which is
the best way to achieve full civil equality for blacks,
through stages of development and accommodation, or all
at once; and, even if all at once is preferred or regarded as
the sounder choice, is a political choice for gradualism so
wrong in the narrow legal sense, since neither the original
unreasonable as to require constitutional condemnation?
Constitution nor the 14th amendment made this principle
explicit, he nonetheless stated the higher truth of the
American Constitution. Why is that? The explanation
needs both to take note of the natural right teaching of the
Declaration of Independence, which articulates the most
fundamental principles of American government, and
then to consider the application of those principles to the
American political community. We must answer three
questions: (l) What is the teaching of the Declaration of
Independence? (2) What application does it have to Amer·
ican government in general? (3) What application does it
have to the distinctive condition of chattel slavery in the
land of freedom, reinforced by racial difference, which is
then eliminated, first as a result of military and political
necessity, and then through constitutional amendment?
First, according to the self-evident truth of the Declaration
of Independence, all men are naturally equal in their rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights
are universal but pre-political; they apply to all men as
men, but they have nothing to do with citizenship in any
political community. Because the rights are not secured by
To argue that full civil equality is incompatible with Jim
Crow legislation does not deny the existence of the social
sphere, which the Plessy opinion distinguishes from politi·
cal and civil rights. I take issue with the Plessy argument
on the relationship between law and the social sphere. To
the extent that we can distinguish the social from the po·
litical (including the civil), the former refers to the volun·
are expounding."46 But Marshall never meant, as Bickel,
following Holmes and Brandeis before him, did, that the
fundamental principles of the Constitution are themselves
open to change over time. 47
Is it possible to provide an interpretation of the issues in
the school segregation cases which does justice to Plessy,
reaches the same result as Brown, and does not rely on a
view of the Constitution and the judicial function according to which the most important principle is the rule of the
majority and all else is subject to changing needs?
A Revised Brown Opinion
nature, men consent to form governments. If government
is to be based on consent and limited to the securing of
rights, the resulting community would seem to need the
support of self-love or interest. No one has a natural right
to join any given political community. It was on this basis
that Jefferson proposed emancipation and colonization of
the slaves in Virginia in 1783 and Lincoln opposed slavery
as morally wrong and in opposition to the Declaration,
without advocating political equality48 A colonization pol·
icy may never have been practical, given the number of
58
tary actions of individuals and private associations; their
decisions regarding association and disassociation consti-
tute action in the social rather than the political sphere.
Then we must distinguish the social sphere, as liable to
government regulation, from the purely private sphere,
which is not. Congress may be justified in prohibiting cer·
tain forms of racial discrimination in the social sphere, on
the authority of the commerce clause, as it did in the 1964
Civil Rights Act, but neither Congress nor the state may
tell anyone whom to invite to dinner. Furthermore, the
civil rights legislation reflects a concrete and healthy con·
sent-giving, which distinguishes it from judicial interven·
tion in the social sphere. Finally, what distinguishes the
legislative action in· Plessy from the legislative action of
1964 is that the former, by legally enforcing a dual citizen·
ship, is inconsistent with our republican form of government, as discussed above, while the latter is consistent
with it.
The distinction between commercial activity and social
activity in the narrow sense of socializing is important for
understanding the best case ever made for the gradualism
approach to full citizenship for Negroes. In his Atlanta Ex·
position Address of 1895, one year before Plessy, Booker
T. Washington emphasized vocational education for
SUMMER 1983
�blacks as a way of their attaining self-sufficiency. He argued from expediency as well as principle for racial coop-
derives its importance from our form of government, or, to
eration in commercial matters, and he was willing to let
social association wait. In a sentence which appears to an-
form of government is instituted to secure. Ours is a gov-
ticipate Plessy and which puts it in its best light, he said:
"In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as
the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to
mutual progress." According to Washington, "No race
that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world
is long in any degree ostracized."' 0
This position was vigorously criticized by W. E. B. DuBois, on the grounds that it distorted half-truths about the
Negro and his position and that it had the effect of getting
both races to accept the Negro's subordinate position as
permanent. 51 It is not easy to decide who was right at the
time. Surely commercial success and education seem to
depend on civil and political rights and higher education;
on the other hand, Washington was, as DuBois acknowledged, the most influential black leader of his time among
both races and the blacks surely needed the assistance of
the white majority. But it is not necessary to settle that
debate in order to say that to the extent that Plessy ever
was a legitimate decision, it was within the context of a
gradualist approach to bringing full civil rights to the
newly freed race. If 1896 was arguably too soon after slavery to accomplish this, especially in light of an appraisal of
hatreds and fears and the actual condition of the black
race, surely by 1954 it was easy to review the history of Jim
Crow legislation and pronounce that the South had not
proceeded in good faith, that Harlan was right about the
consequences of judicially validating Jim Crow legislation,
and that the practice was in violation of the Constitution
because it implied second class citizenship. Plessy then
turns out to be no longer valid, not simply because we wish
to change a practice which a current majority of the country abhors, but also because the only defensible grounds
for the decision implied a timetable for transformation
which had long since expired.
III
Conclusion
This treatment of Brown has intended to show that the
Supreme Court's achievement was substantial but flawed,
and that the flaws involved (l) the exercise of judicial review, especially as it concerns the overturning of the Plessy
precedent, (2) the distinction between de facto and de jure
segregation, and (3) the meaning of education in American political life. The first topic has been treated above; it
remains to show the connection between the Court's
treatment of the other two topics in its Brown opinion and
the subsequent problems in connection with the implementation of Brown.
The distinction between de facto and de jure segregation
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
be more precise, from the way of life which our republican
ernment which is instituted to secure rights but which
refuses to take note of their right exercise. It is a government which looks up to an individual's right to pursue happiness without defining the content of that happiness.
Ours is therefore necessarily a limited government if we
consider the things it can legitimately require of its citizens. Because rights or individual claims take precedence
over duties, or obligations of citizens, American political
life necessarily knows and respects a private sphere. Our
form of government is similar to Plato's account of democracy in that we tend to regard all desires as equal; it differs
from that account, and hence from a pure democracy, in
its attempt to avoid the excesses of democratic license.
Our way of doing that, however, in contrast to that of
Plato's account of the best regime, is mainly through institutional checks and balances and a strict scrutiny of governmental powers rather than education as a means of
cultivating human excellence, moral or intellectual. Consequently, certain democratic vices, associated with the
emancipation of our desires and passions, are tolerated so
long as the resulting activity does not harm another in life
or limb. Love of one's own is generally more powerful than
love of community; in American government, or in any liberal democracy, the political constraints on self-interest, as
Tocqueville called them, are minimal. 52
And now we come to race differences and the problem
of slavery in the land of freedom.sl The severity of the
problem of reconciling individualism with racial harmony
was discussed by Tocqueville, Jefferson, Lincoln, and
W. E. B. DuBois. The transformation of the former slave
race into black Americans presents such difficulties because no government, and certainly no liberal government, can eradicate prejudice, which is a reflex of self-
love, and the natural racial difference makes it impossible
to eradicate race prejudice. On the other hand, eradication is not only not necessary, it is not appropriate. The
limited objectives of liberal government make it possible
for government to treat its citizens equally under the law
and for individuals to associate in distinctive groupings
and even take pride in their differences. This is precisely
what W. E. B. DuBois discovered and advocated in 1897.
If we carefully consider what race prejudice really is, we find
it, historically, to be nothing but the friction between different groups of people; it is the difference in aim, in feelings, in
ideals of two different races; if, now, this difference exists
touching territory, laws, language, or even religion, it is manifest that these people cannot live in the same territory without fatal collision; but if, on the other hand, there is substantial agreement in laws, language and religion, if there is a
satisfactory adjustment of economic life, then there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two or
three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that
men of different races might not strive together for their race
ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation. 54
59
�More recent expressions of the same thought, if not as
comprehensive, can be found in Malcolm X's Black Nationalism and in Black Power. 55
If there is a range of legitimate associations and disassociations, regarding religious and ethnic background and
economic status as well as race, then the rules for such
as~
sociation should be minimal and, generally, should proceed from a government authority which reflects the consent of the governed. Thirty years after the Brown decision
we note that the federal government and especially the
federal courts are still involved in the administration of
school systems. To a large extent, this is because the implications of the Brown opinion, regarding equal educational
opportunity, made it difficult for the courts to recognize
the limits of legitimate court intervention.
This became clear when the desegregation suits
reached metropolitan school districts, starting in North
Carolina and then reaching Denver, Detroit, Columbus,
and Dayton, which cover the major Supreme Court decisions of the 1970s. The problem is this: once the clear cut
cases of dual school systems are eliminated, what is the
test to distinguish a school board's disciminatory act of
segregation from racially neutral actions and individual
choices, including where to live and whether to go to a private school? The Supreme Court has not yet thrown out
the distinction between government-enforced and adventitious segregation-for it would be difficult if not impossible to justify such judicial action; but it has not come up
with any clear principle or test for distinguishing racial imbalance that results from a segregative act from racial imbalance that is adventitious.
The lower federal courts, which have the responsibility
for implementing Brown, have tended to view racial imbalance as presumptively illegal, the result of a segregative
act; often that act is no more than the failure to draw lines
or construct new schools in ways that would have increased the actual racial balance, regardless of neighborhoods. With some exceptions the majority of the Supreme
Court has tended to follow the lower courts on this. The
decisions in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Denver
cases 56 approached the position that the Constitution required metropolitan communities to fashion plans to eliminate racial isolation in the public schools, even if it required system-wide transportation of students. In the
former case, the Court justified its decision by linking all
the racial imbalance to the condition of the dual school
system in 1954, a doubtful assumption; in the latter case, a
narrow and limited finding of segregative intent reversed
the presumption for the entire district and this led to the
system-wide judicial remedy. The majority did pull back,
in the Detroit case in 1974,57 from upholding a lower
court's inter-district metropolitan remedy, on the grounds
that there was no evidence of inter-district segregation.
The dissent pointed out that very little actual integration
was possible within the Detroit school system by itself and
the state was responsible for education. But was the politi-
60
cal process required by the Constitution to give racial balance precedence over community control and neighbor-
hood schools?
Then in two cases decided the same day in 1979,58 the
Supreme Court upheld system-wide remedies, following
the reasoning of the lower courts (in one case the trial
court and in another the court of appeals, which reversed
the trial court) that the existing racial imbalance was, in
each case, a remnant from 1954, when even though it was
not officially sanctioned, there was in fact a dual school
system. Of course such arguments have some plausibility,
since the very distinction between de facto and de jure is, at
the boundary, a fiction. Clearly, public authorities follow
private wishes, and there was indirect government in-
volvement in housing discrimination in 1954; hence it had
an effect, indirectly on the school system. But the connec·
lion between that discrimination and school attendance
patterns 25 years later is nebulous. The Court seems to be
driving the mathematical principle of racial balance to the
limits of its logic, with no good results to show for it. In the
name of equal educational opportunity, it is sanctioning
lower court ordered plans which consider nothing but racial balance. This has produced, or accentuated, "white
flight" and it has not improved anyone's education.
The most instructive judicial reflections on the Court's
dilemma come from Justice Powell, whose cautious attitude toward judicial power resembles Frankfurter's. In his
opinion in the Denver case, justice Powell described the
Brown mandate as having evolved from neutral desegregation to "an affirmative duty to desegregate." He went on
to question the continuing utility of the de facto/ de jure
distinction.
In imposing on metropolitan southern school districts an af.
firrnative duty entailing large scale transportation of pupils, to
eliminate segregation in the schools, the Court required these
districts to alleviate conditions which in large part did not
result from historic, state-imposed de jure segregation.
Rather, the familiar root cause of segregated schools in all the
biracial metropolitan areas of our country is essentially the
same: one of segregated residential and migratory patterns
the impact of which on the racial composition of the schools
was often perpetuated and rarely ameliorated by action of
public school authorities. This is a national, not a southern
phenomenon. And it is largely unrelated to whether a particular state had or did not have segregative school laws. 59
Powell proposed that in place of scrutinizing the actions
of the school board for "segregative intent," the Court
hold the states responsible for operating "integrated
school systems" and examine their actions (such as location of new facilities, attendance zones, etc.) with a view
toward their general integrative effect. Powell did not discuss the busing question, nor did he indicate whether he
thought the Court's role would be reduced as a result of
his proposal. He apparently abandoned his argument for
abandoning the de facto/ de jure distinction, for in his disSUMMER 1983
�sent in the 1979 Columbus case, he noted that it was impossible to expect school boards to bring about desirable
racial balance and that judicial mandates would probably
generate further white flight and resegregation. In other
words, he came to see that desegregation would not produce an integrated school system, unless the courts were
willing to sustain racial balance as a constitutional imperative. Even then, to succeed the courts would have to insist
on consolidated school districts and eliminate private
schools.
We turn, finally, to the Supreme Court's view of education. Justice Warren called it "the very foundation of good
citizenship" and "a principal instrument in awakening the
child to cultural values."60 This formulation conceals two
problems or complications. The first is that education as
socialization is problematic, however necessary it may be.
Numerous Supreme Court cases indicate that there is a
fine line between illegal indoctrination and permissible inculcation of habits of citizenship; quite understandably,
the individualistic bent of the first amendment freedoms
frequently limits this form of education. The freedom involved here is not only one of association, but it includes
conceptions of racial identification. In Brown the Supreme Court accepted the racial amalgamation view of integration as if it were the only valid formulation. It ignored
the view of integration which emphasizes a substantial
separation within the larger integrated society. This view
was prominently stated by Black Power and Black Nationalism advocates in the late 1960s, but it was more fully
stated much earlier by DuBois, as we have already noted.
Certain kinds of "freedom of choice" are much more likely
to succeed than a judicially enforced uniformity. One
man's consent may be another man's prejudice, but if
community control, in the form of residential schools and
local school boards, has any validity, it must apply to communities which are largely white as well as to those which
are largely black.
Second, the Supreme Court must understand that education involves more than mere socialization. It should not
say, as it did in a 1969 case upholding a student's right to
wear an armband expressing opposition to the Vietnam
War in class: "The principal use to which the schools are
dedicated is to accommodate students during prescribed
hours for the purpose of certain types of activities. Among
the activities is intercommunication among the students."61 Here the Court unwittingly likens secondary
school education to the operation of a day care center.
And even when it prudently permits race to be taken into
account in a complex admissions process for higher educa-
tion, as it did in the famous Bakke case, it should not lend
its support to a statement which confuses academic
achievement and intellectual powers with minimal aca-
demic competency. Justice Powell, whose vote and opinion were decisive in Bakke, cited with approval and then
appended to his opinion the Harvard College Admissions
affirmative action statement; it said that "the number of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
applicants who are deemed to be 'not qualified' is comparatively small."6 2 If these statements truly reflect the authoritative view of education in America, it's no wonder
that we have become "a nation at risk."
The great achievement of Brown v. Board of Education
was that it struck down the Plessy doctrine of "separate
but equal," which eventually, and necessarily, led to the
complete elimination of state-enforced racial segregation_63 The single opinion which accompanied the unanimous decision in Brown was an important part of the
Court's achievement; it facilitated the dismantling of genuine dual school systems. Neither the unanimity nor the
accommodating spirit of the Brown II implementation decision in 1955, which called for desegregation "with all deliberate speed," could prevent substantial Southern resistance for a decade. While I have criticized the Court's
opinion and offered a fuller and, in my opinion, sounder
argument for the decision, not even a perfect opinion ac-
companying the Court's unanimity would have eradicated
racial prejudice or actual inequality in American life. I
have argued that the eradication of either is beyond the
limited powers of a liberal democratic government. I do
think that if the Court's opinion had presented a sounder
treatment of the ordered liberty that we can reasonably expect from our government, it would have prevented the
numerous judicially ordered pupil assignment plans which
enforce racial balance in the public schools and do nothing
more than drive students desirous of education, white and
black, out of the public schools. And, if the Court's opinion had presented a sounder view of education than the
amalgamation view of integration, we would have more re-
spect for the variety of legitimate views on racial identification and less confusion about education as training and
habituation versus education as intellectual development.
]. 347
u.s. 483, 495 (1954).
2. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black
America's Struggle for Equality, New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1976, pp.
710, 747.
3. The New York Times, May 18, 1954, p. 14.
4. Times, May 17, 1964, p. IDe.
5. Roger Wilkins, "The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Twenty years After Brown; Negro Progress and Black Rage," in Times Magazine, May 12,
1974, p. 43.
6. Ji'or the passage quoted from the dentist and statements by Rustin and
Wilkins, see U.S. News 6 World Report, May 20, 1974, "After 20 Years:
New Turn in Black Revolution," pp. 24ff; for the Browne interview, see
Roger Wilkins, op. cit.; for the Clark quote, see Times, May 12, 1974, p.
42.
7. Times, May 12, 1974.
8. "Desegregation: Where Do We Go From Here?" The New Republic,
February 7, 1970.
9. Fulfilling the Letter and the Spirit of the Law: Desegregation of the Nation's Public Schools, Report of the United States Commission on Civil
Rights, August, 1976; see summary and conclusion, pp. 293-313, including table 4.1, p. 296.
10. James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1966; the Report and its findings
were briefly discussed in William Chapman's newspaper article, "Key As-
61
�sumptions of Desegregation Under Challenge," in the Washington Post,
May 12, 1974, "Outlook," pp. C.2ff.
11. Both quotations come from the Times story of May 12, 1974,
p. 42.
12. See Washington Post, May 12, 1974, "Outlook," p. c.lff.
13. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1
(1971); Keys v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, 413 U.S. 189
(1973).
14. The basis for the first statement is the gap between the Scholastic
Apptitude Test scores of Negroes and whites, which was over 100 points,
on the 200 to 800 scale, for both the verbal and math sections in 1981. See
The New York Times, January 14, 1983, p. 1la. The test results accompa·
nied an article on the NCAA proposal to require college freshmen to
have a minimum combined SAT score of 700 (out of 1600) in order to be
eligible to compete in interscholastic athletics. The Commission's Re·
port, entitled "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative of Educational Re·
form," was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4, 1983.
15. !63 u.s. 537.
16. 100 U.S. 303, 307-08 (1880). This was cited by Harlan in Plessy at 163
u.s. 537, 556.
17. Quoted by Kluger at p. 652. All the briefs and oral arguments in the
case can be found in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme
Court of the United States: Constitutional Law, ed. by Philip B. Kurland
and Gerhard Casper, Arlington, Va.; University Publications of America,
Inc.; 1975, volumes 49 and 49a.
18. These remarks go beyond the argument of the opinion of the Court.
They draw on the reflections of Jefferson, Tocqueville, and Lincoln,
which will be discussed below.
19. For as full an account of the Supreme Court's deliberations as is possible, including the distinctive contributions of Justice Frankfurter and
the significance of Chief Justice Vinson's death, after the first oral argu·
ment, and his replacement by Chief Justice Warren, see Kluger, chapters
22-25.
20. 305 u.s. 337, 349-50.
21. 339 u.s. 637.
22. 339 u.s. 629, 634.
23. See Kluger, pp. 614-616.
24. See 354 U.S. 483, 487, note I.
25. 354 u.s. 397, 398.
26. This may have been due, in part, to the different lawyers. See Klu·
ger's account of James Nabritt, who argued the District of Columbia case
at p. 521. op. cit. From the very outset of the litigation, in 1951, Nabritt
challenged the race classification for public schools.
27. 347 U.S. 483, 495. The original implementation decision, known as
Brown II, was decided in 1955. The cases were remanded to the lower
courts to enter orders and decrees "as are necessary and proper to admit
to public schools on a racially non-discriminatory basis with all deliberate
speed the parties to these cases." 394 U.S. 294, 30l.
28. Pp. 491-2.
29. P. 493.
30. P. 494.
31. P. 494, note II.
32. Kluger, p. 439.
33. The study which the Court cited, "Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development," Midcentury White House Conference, 1950, did not involve North-South comparisons. The study which
did, "Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children," was writ·
ten by Clark and his wife, Mamie. It compared the responses from chil·
dren in Massachusetts with children in Arkansas. The work was originally
published in Newcomb and Hartley, eel., Readings in Social Psychology,
New York: Holt; 1947; it was included in the third edition, published in
1958, at pp. 602-611. Table 4 makes the North-South comparisons. Kluger gives a full account of Clark and his tests and the varied reactions of
the NAACP lawyers and other scholars; see chapter 14, and pp. 353-6,
498, and other references under the index heading, "Clark," "tests." The
problem with Clark's tests was first brought to my attention by Hadley
Arkes, in his essay, "The Problem of Kenneth Clark," in Commentary,
November, 1974.
62
34. See Chapman's discussion of the Coleman Report and later studies,
in the Washington Post, note 10 above, and David Armor's "The Evidence of Busing," in The Public Interest, Summer, 1972.
35. Kluger, p. 421.
36. 347 u.s. 497, 499-500.
37. See Kluger, chapter 23, for a discussion of the Justices' deliberations.
38. "Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law," in 73 Harvard
Law Review 1, November, 1959, pp. 33, 19, 33, 34, 15, 16.
39. "Racial Discrimination and Judicial Integrity: A Reply to Professor
Wechsler," in 108 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1 (1959); re·
printed in Selected Essays in Constitutional Law, 1938-1962, edited by
Edward L. Barrett, Jr., et al., St. Paul: West Publishing Co.; 1963, p. 819;
the quotation is from p. 839.
40. "The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions," in 69 Yale Law Jour·
nal421 (1960); reprinted in Selected Essays in Constitutional Law, p. 844;
the quotation is from p. 847.
41. The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Poli·
tics, Indianapolis: Babbs Merrill Company; 1962, p. 69.
42. Ibid, pp. 24 (see also 27), 25, 28.
43. See Kluger, pp. 653-655.
44. "The Original Understanding of the Segregation Decision," 69 Har·
vardLaw Review 1, November, 1955, pp. 61, 63.
45. Kluger, p. 655.
46. 4 Wheaton 316, 407(1819).
47. See The Least Dangerous Branch, pp. 106-7, where Bickel mistakenly
likens Marshall's to Brandeis' view of the Constitution as a "living organism."
48. For Jefferson, see Notes on Virginia, Query XIII; for Lincoln, see his
Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854, as well as the Lincoln-Douglas De·
bates.
49. See Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part II, chapter 10, edited by J.P.
Mayer, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books; 1969.
50. "Atlanta Exposition Address," in Herbert J. Storing, ed., What Coun·
try Have I? Political Writings by Black Americans, New York: St. Martins;
1970, p. 61. Washington gave his address in 1895. Nowhere in his autobiography, Up From Slavery, where he includes the text and discusses the
reaction to the speech, does he refer to the Louisiana law of 1890, which
was challenged in Plessy v. Ferguson. However, in 1915, he wrote an essay
in The New Republic arguing forcefully against segregation laws in terms
of both expediency and morality. See "My View of Segregation Laws," in
The New Republic, December 4, 1915, pp. ll3-1l4.
51. See "Of Booker T. Washington and Others," in Storing, op. cit., pp.
92-102, especially pp. 97-101.
52. This argument draws on Leo Strauss' discussion of natural right in
ancient and modern political philosophy. See Natural Right and History,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1953, and the title essay in What is
Political Philosophy?, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press; 1959.
53. For this formulation and the subsequent argument I am indebted to
Herbert}. Storing, whose essay "The Founders and Slavery," was given
at St. John's College on March 5, 1976, published in the bicentennial is·
sue of The College (pp. 17-25), and subsequently reprinted in Robert H.
Horwitz, The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, Charlottes·
ville, Va.: University of Virginia Press; 1976.
54. In Storing, What Country Have I?, p. 82.
55. See Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet," and Stokeley Carmichael
and Charles Hamilton, "Black Power: Its Need and Substance," in Star·
ing, op. cit., pp. 146-163; !65-181.
56. For the citations, see note 13.
57. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717.
58. Columbua Board of Education v. Penick, 443 U.S. 449; Dayton Board
of Education v. Brinkman, 443 U.S. 526.
59. 413 u.s. 189,220-222, 222-223 (1973).
60. 347 u.s. 483, 493.
61. Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 393 U.S. 503, 512 (1969).
62. University of California Reb'ents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 321 (1978).
63. When Virginia's anti-miscegination law was invalidated in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1) all Jim Crow legislation had been eradicated.
SUMMER 1983
�OccASIONAL DiscouRsEs
Class Day Address
1983
Chaninah Maschler
In the year of the chartering of St. John's College1784-Kant published a little essay whose opening sentences might serve as a statement of the moral aim of a
liberal arts education. The essay is called What is Enlightenment? and it begins roughly as follows:
Enlightenment is man's exodus from self-incurred minority.
To be a minor means, not to be able to use one's reason except as directed by someone else. Such minority is selfincurred when it is not due to lack of rational competence but
to lack of resolve and courage. Sapere aude, Dare to know!
Have the courage to use your understanding. That is the
motto of enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are to blame for the fact that so large
a portion of mankind, after nature has long discharged them
from tutelage and promoted them to adult estate, nevertheless gladly stay minors all their life and why it is so easy for
others to set themselves up as their guardians. It's much more
comfortable not to be of age: If I have a book that understands for me, a pastor, rabbi, priest who serves as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, I need not trouble myself_ Why think if I have the money to pay others to
take care of the irksome chore for me?
That it takes effort, continual downing of lassitude, to
be or become free needs no elaboration. But why does it
take courage, more courage, perhaps, today, or courage of
a different sort, than in 1784? If courage is called for, there
must be something dangerous, or at least frightening in
the offing.
Many of us~ tutors and students~ precisely if we are or
have been happy at this institution of learning, describe
our St. John's experience on the model of Anderson's fairy
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md., Chaninah Maschler previously published a translation of Lessing's Ernst and Falk: Conversations
for Free Masons (Autumn/Winter 82-83) St. John's Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tale of the ugly duckling: You remember, in high school or
at Columbia or Yale or Princeton, we didn't fit; we were
lonely; doubted ourselves and our competence. Then,
upon coming here, and learning to trust and act on continual Kantian invitations to self-reliance, we found ourselves
flourishing amongst our own kind. We concluded: We are
swans really! Our egg got mislaid with duck parents and
duck schools!
But I don't see anything frightening in the fact that you
turn out to be a swan rather than a duck. Anderson's is a
self-indulgent, sentimental, self-congratulating tale, with
which we ought to be done. That we should "find ourselves" as noble swans is not the import of Kant's sermon.
So I want to tell a different parable, though upon reflection you will recognize a formal likeness between the story
I ask you to junk and that which I ask you to live with.
Before turning to the story, let's reminisce:
Do you remember the innocent days of Euclid proposition I 27? It gave us confidence that the local condition of
equality of alternate angles would guarantee that, no matter how far the straight lines making those angles with a
transverse be extended, the straight lines would never
meet (dfn 23, P- 190 Heath). I can still hear the voice of the
student at the board who showed that, supposing the condition of equality of alternate angles met but the attribute
of parallelism denied of the lines, one and the same angle
AEF would have to be both greater than and equal to the
angle EFG_ Reaching the crucial step of the argument,
she could not contain herself and shouted: "Oedipus
Schmoedipus, he can't marry his mother."
What she meant was, of course, that though tragic individuals may find themselves burdened with incompatible
roles, mathematical individuals~angles, lines, figureswhile normally playing different roles in the course of a
demonstration-else the demonstration would not work,
63
�wouldn't have a "middle term" to link the "extremes" of
the enunciation-mathematical individuals, I say, are utterly secure from conflation of incompossible roles.
Some of us thought that what Socrates taught in theRepublic is that we should live in admiration of those serene
mathematical individuals who are utterly free of faction.
(Cf Rep. VI, 500C; IX, 582; X, 606)
Should we?
Every time I read the fable of the wolf and the lamb and
hear the voice of reason weakly bleating ". . . et que par
consequent en aucune {aeon je ne puis troubler sa boisson"
(" ... from which it follows, by rational necessity, that I
cannot have muddied His Majesty's waters") I think on
the freshman mathematics tutorial and that Euclidean
clincher-atopon, impossible, ridiculous-which, La Fontaine reminds us, proves impotent when reasoning with
wolves.
That men might, by redesigning and reassigning power,
be prevented from becoming wolves to men was the great
hope of the philosophers of the enlightenment. We still
live in that hope. But we must persevere in it without the
prop and sop of grand theories of history's "tending" that
way-the way of the sweetly reasonable lamb.
And why is that? Because of a story told by those who
taught Aesop himself, a story perhaps told again by the
poet who sang Songs of Innocence and of Experience; I
mean William Blake. Here is the story:
Once upon a time there was a tiger cub who was being
raised by a herd of goats. He learned their language,
adapted his voice to their gentle way of bleating, and
though his teeth were pointy and made for tearing, he nibbled grass goat-fashion. One night the herd was attacked
by a fierce full-grown tiger. The goats scattered but the
cub stayed. He was amazed at the sight of the tiger, but
not afraid. He let out a bleat and began to tear up some
grass. The great tiger roared at him: "Why do you make
that silly sound? And what are you chewing there?" He
grabbed the cub, carried him off to his den, and there ordered him to get his teeth into a bloody raw piece of meat
left over from a previous foray. The cub shuddered. The
old one force-fed him. just as the cub was about to spit out
the morsel he began to taste the blood. Overcome, he
smacked his lips and licked his jowls, rose up, opened his
mouth. Stretching and arching, lashing his tail, there suddenly came from his throat a great roar. His teacher asked:
"Now do you know who you are?" (Adapted from
Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies ofindia, New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1956.)
Sri Ramakrishna told the ancient story in answer to
Kant's question, "What is enlightenment?" and I pass it on
to you to counterpoise the tale of the lamb which, though
greatly consoling, and true, is also false: The wolf is not
just the other fellow: The i-sounds of Blake's tiger poem
and the -am's of the song of the lamb rhyme out I AM.
THE HORIZON AS THE
LAST SHIP HOME
On a diagonal of light,
the world hinges. The sea
slants blue miles away
to the horizon. At that
edge, the air is burning
like the wreck
of the last ship home.
J.
64
H. BEALL
SUMMER 1983
�Against Time*
Eva Brann
*Given as two Friday Night Lectures at St. John's College in Annapolis on February 18 and 25, 1983.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
65
�Contents
I. Approaches to the Inquiry
I.
2.
3.
4.
5.
67
Time Language
Time Puzzles
Time in Science
Temporal Sensibility
The Philosophers
II. Aristotle: Time as the Number of Motion
73
I. Time and its Measures
2. The Now
3. Memory
III. Augustine: Time as the "Distention" of the Soul . . . . . . . . . . . .
Husser!: The Phenomenology of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
78
80
I. Retention
2. The Diagram of Time
IV. Kant: Time as Inner Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I.
2.
3.
4.
5.
82
Inner Sense
Understanding
Imagination
Time and Space
Temporal Thinking
V. Heidegger: Temporality as the Meaning of Existence
86
I. Ecstatic Temporality
2. Difficulties
VI. Time and Imagination
89
I. The Non·Being of Time
2. Time as Noticed Passage
3. The Phases of Time
a.
b.
c.
d.
The
The
The
The
Present
Past
Future
Past as Paramount Phase
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . l 00
I.
II.
Ill.
IV.
Main Texts
Supplementary Texts, Studies, Commentaries
Collections
Time in Science
Notes l-37 ................................................ 101
�Against Time
That time has no being and no power, that the past is
most to be cherished by those who have least taste for bygones, that our own temporality is the work of the imagination-these are the reflections that I want to articulate and
confirm in the following inquiry, for I believe and hope to
show that opinions of this sort are necessary for thinking
of ourselves as free and for filling our lives with substance.
I. APPROACHES TO THE INQUIRY*
Given this purpose, the first question is where to begin
an inquiry whose object appears to be both ubiquitous and
nowhere. There seem to be so many likely approaches to
the topic of time: through attention to our all-pervading
talk of time in ordinary life and through the neat enigmas
which even the lightest musing upon time generates,
through the science of nature which claims to determine
its concept, and through the observations of poets, novelists, and psychologists concerning our temporal sensibilities. All these efforts provide necessary grist to the mill of
reflection, but Time itself does not seem to be revealed in
or through them, and the very profusion of speculation
bears witness to its elusiveness. There remains the way
through philosophy, where time is treated in conjunction
with the question of being-and particularly of human being. Here the nature of time becomes at last a direct
theme. I shall, therefore, after a brief review of the other
approaches, devote the middle section of this study to an
interpretation of the five philosophers who seem to me to
have given the most coherent and pregnant answers to the
question What is Time?, and conclude with a section of my
own thoughts on, or rather against, time.
1. TIME LANGUAGE
The first and obvious way to get to the nature of time
might seem to be through examining the mentions of time
in ordinary language, through attending to what everyday
speech says of time, for example: My watch tells the time,
and I can give you the time. Do you have the time to give
*All references are to books listed in the Bibliography.
Eva Brann recently published Paradoxes of Education in a Republic'{Unlversity of Chicago Press, 1979).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
me some time? I am wasting my time, while having the
time of my life. Time is money, and the times are bad. At
this point in time he has no comment, but time will tell.
Time heals and at the same time, time destroys. The time
is coming; the time is now; the time is past. We live in time
and through times, are on time, race against time, kill time,
donate time, are true to the end of time, and imagine once
upon a time.
Now the very profusion of usages, although it is an index of the great frequency of our references to time 1,
seems to me to preclude the discovery of a central meaning without our falling into the error of decreeing which of
these usages is canonically ordinary. Certainly, how time
occurs in daily speech is suggestive: Augustine, for instance, begins his inquiry by asking how it is that we can
speak of time as long or short (XI 15), and Heidegger refers
to the observation that we speak of time as passing away
and not as coming into being ( Logik, par. 20). It turns out,
however, that both authors, far from being guided by what
is said, conclude that ordinary speech obscures the nature
of time.
It seems, all in all, that from listening to the use of the
term time one, but only one, crucial conclusion can be
reached: Time is always spoken of metaphorically or figuratively. It may be treated as a spatial dimension with
length and points, or as a possession to have and to give, or
in a personification, as an agent of multifarious potency.
Its power is sometimes benign but far more often hurtful,
as in the insistently grim time-figures of the Shakespearean Sonnets: devouring Time, confounding Time, decaying Time, swift-footed Time, sluttish Time, Time's injurious hand, Time's fell hand (19, 55, 63-65).
Most time references are well-worn and mean little; they
are time-honored phrases, once perhaps heartfelt, for disposing of the mysteries of change. When we talk of time as
healing we consign to a hackneyed phrase the miraculous
restorative power of nature and the blessed oblivion of
which memory is capable. Poets, on the other hand, tend
to give time injurious epithets, because, I think, they speak
more often and more accurately of the high, intense, and
vulnerable configurations of life than we do in ordinary
speech.
The word "time" is not, of course, remotely all that language says of time. All our sentences require tensed verbs,
particularly "is," "was," and "shall be." But can their use
tell us their meaning? Or must we not rather know what is
meant by present, past, and future, the three phases of
time, to understand the use of aspects and tenses?
67
�2. TIME PUZZLES
'
A second start might be made from the puzzles about
time which can be so copiously and near-spontaneously
generated. For example, why does time seem to have a forward arrow and a leading edge? 2 Does it progress in a continuous flux or in atomic jerks? Is it within or outside of us,
in the soul or in the world? What is the "now" in which
alone things are present and which reason reduces to a
point between past and future? And above all, how is it
possible that anything be in that past which is no longer, or
in the future which is not yet? There are many more such
problems, even excluding those concerning temporal con-
tinuity, which belong primarily to mathematics.
Such conundrums are easily disposed of by the positivist, who obviates them by pointing out that in ordinary life,
before the onset of a philosophical seizure, no one is at all
inconvenienced by them, so why concoct enigrnas? 3 To be
more than idle puzzles they must arise in the context of a
well-grounded inquiry into time itself. They are not its beginning but its by-products.
acute literature about the philosophical implications of
time in nature, or more accurately, in the science of na-
ture. (For all references see Sec. IV of the Bibliography.)
Three branches of physics seem to be especially amenable
to philosophical interpretation: Thermodynamics seems
to have implications about the forward motion, the socalled "arrow" of time and its irreversibility. Relativity theory appears to have exploded the common sense notion of
universal time or the simultaneity of the present moment
throughout space. Quantum theory throws in doubt the
continuity of time.
But intriguing as such theories are, because they are
bent on interpreting with ingenuity and vigour the unignorable discoveries of physics, they help only incidentally
and negatively with the question: What is time? For in
these theories time is invariably understood as a privileged
process or motion, either a macro-motion or an atomic vi-
bration; the temporality of these timing-motions is itself
left unexplained-as indeed it should be since such an explanation would no longer be amenable to verification by
observation. The implication is that time really is an aspect
of motion to be got at only in telling time. But time-telling
is commonly taken to be a three-cornered affair, involving
an observable event, a timing device, and an observer who
3. TIME IN SCIENCE
In view of the fact that time is the basic independent
variable of all the physics accessible to laymen, it would
seem reasonable to turn first to the science of nature, that
is, to physics, for help in the search for the nature of time.
Reflective physicists and philosophers of physics have, accordingly, propounded powerful theories of time. At the
very beginning of the science of dynamics stands the most
extreme theory of the reality of time, Newton's self-subsisting, equably flowing, absolute world time-and its
equally extreme opponent, Leibniz's relative time, a mere
order of phenomenal succession. 4 Newton's theory of an
absolute temporal flux may well be integral to the theological purposes of the Principia, but it does not seem to be
operational within its physics. It is a philosophical rather
than a physical requirement. In contrast, the plain statement by a great physicist of the most minimal notion of
time conceivable is fairly recent, namely Einstein's wholly
operational or instrumental definition of local time as "the
position of the small hand of my watch" (p. 39; an instrumental definition is one in which the term is defined
through the instrument and the operation which measures its magnitude). Although it may seem strange at first
that after two and a half millenia of arduous exploration of
the question "What is time?'' the outcome should be that
time is what the clock tells, one soon sees that this definition is the cleanest and clearest reflection on time that a
physicist can give. For in physics time must be positive,
that is to say, it should be no more than an observable
quantity the method of whose measurement is defined.
There is then an enormous and intellectually most
68
can distinguish and relate the two and communicate his
findings. And though a physical theory may include the
observer with respect to his relative motion or his unavoid-
able interference with the observation, it is regarded as the
part of psychology to deal with the distinguishing and relating itself, that is, with the internal observer. In sum, in
physics time itself is the name of a fundamental motion,
while the telling of time is not ultimately explicable in
physical terms.
Furthermore the philosophical interpretation of physical time is by no means univocal, any more than are those
of philosophy in the wider sense, with which the philosophy of physics does, after all, eventually merge. Therefore,
through this approach a clarification of the concepts of
time implicit in various physical theories is the most that
can be expected.
Let me give very brief versions of three accessible cases
in point.
I. Eddington introduced the phrase "Time's Arrow" to
sum up the observations of thermodynamics. Let there be
a partitioned container, isolated from outside influences,
and let one part be filled with air, the other empty. Now
remove the partition, and the molecules of air in their individual random motions will over time spreed through the
whole vessel (while the probability that they will ever again
simultaneously collect at one end is so vanishingly small as
to make the case practically impossible). The aggregate of
molecules as a whole will then have less organization and
will be said to show increasing "disorder," by which is
meant here a certain kind of homogeneity. Its measure is
called "entropy." The large-scale phenomenal effects of
this statistical law of nature are quite familiar in life:
SUMMER 1983
�Things left to their own devices tend to fall into sprawling
disorder.
Now Eddington interprets this irreversible process of
nature as an intrinsic forward tendency of time itself. If he
is right, physics is indeed capable of revealing the nature
of time. There are, however, many and much debated difficulties, for example, whether the universe is an isolated
system, whether a probable event and a process subject to
fluctuations can be imputed to the steady underlying
action of time, whether to show that time is "anisotropic,"
that is, directed, is necessarily to show that it advances,
whether the physical law applies as well to life. But the
most telling difficulty for present purposes is this: An observer can assert that time is reversible, for example, that if
the time coordinate were imagined as reversed the planets
would exactly retrace their orbits, only if he also imagines
his own time as maintaining its direction so that he can
compare the two successive motions. Would notthe same
hold for an observer of irreversible processes, so that he
would have to say not that physical time itself was advancing, but that "disorder" was irreversibly increasing with
time, namely his psychological observer's time the question of whose advance is no longer a matter for physics?
There is a counterargument, to be sure, namely that human memory itself, the condition of time-telling, is an entropic process since it has an entropic physical basis. But
that leaves us with the question, certainly no longer in the
realm of physics, whether the human observer of nature
can logically himself be subject to its law (Eddington, Ch.
IV; Gruenbaum, Chps. 8, 9; Schlegel, pp. 55 ff.; Whitrow,
Ch. IV 3, 4).
2. Einstein begins his 1905 paper, which sets forth the
special theory of relativity, by defining what the common
place far off it will be said to occur at the same time or
simultaneously, with our clock-time for the arrival of its
signal. Further, clocks which are synchronized with a third
are said to be synchronized with each other. Therefore
simultaneity is not universal "nowness" but merely what it
is defined to be by the synchronizing process.
Next Einstein lays down two fundamental axioms. The
first of these is the principle of relativity itself, which says
that the laws of physics governing a system are not affected if the whole is put into uniform rectilinear motion.
The second is that the speed of light is absolute, namely
the same whether the light is emitted from a stationary or
a moving source. Within a page Einstein has shown that
two clocks which are affixed to the ends of a moving rod
and which have been separately synchronized with a clock
in the stationary system, and so with each other from the
point of view of the stationary observer, will not appear to
meet the criteria of synchronicity from the point of view
of the moving observers. What the stationary observer sees
as simultaneous the moving observers do not. That means
that what one observer takes to be the same moment
comes apart for another observer into different moments.
There is no absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity. The now is not universal.
This result is usually interpreted as confuting the common sense notion of a universal contemporaneity, the feeling we have in ordinary circumstances that our now is ev-
eryone's now. But I wonder if that follows. The theory
means by <(the same time here and there" an operation
definable in terms of observations, namely, the relating of
clocks by a signal which takes time to travel back and forth.
The speed of the signal, namely the speed of light, is the
crucial element in the formula which shows that events
sense of mankind had so far taken as a natural given,
simultaneous in one system will not be so in another rela-
namely what it means to say that it is the same time at
places very far apart. His need to do so follows immediately from his definition of local time as what the clock
tells, and that, in turn, embodies a deep reflection on the
nature of physical knowledge. For nothing is to be counted
as scientific theory which does not ultimately refer to possible sensory events. So to tell what time it is at a fixed
place somewhere far off we must have a clock and an observer there and sensible signalling between him and us.
Now even the fastest signal, light, takes time to go there
and to be reflected back; we all know that the light from
the star we now see is not the light being emitted by the
star now. That means that a procedure for synchronizing
both clocks must be established so that we here can say
what time it is there now.
Einstein defines such a procedure. The time for the
light signal to come and go is taken to be equal by defini-
tively moving one. If that signalling speed were to be increased beyond all bounds, an impossibility in physical
theory to be sure, simultaneity would be reinstated.5
But are we in our thinking and imagining bound by the
physicist's requirements? Can we not in our thoughtswhich are as swift as the ships of Homer's Phaeacians,
namely instantaneous-extend ourselves over all space at
once? If our thinking were in principle incapable of coming under the requirements of science we might well imagine any number of friendly extra-terrestrials, moving and
stationary, all thinking of us and of each other simultane-
tion. We signal our time to the remote observer who sets
his clock by it just as he reflects the signal. Upon receiving
it we set our clock to a time exactly half way between our
sending and receiving the signal. The two clocks are thus
said to be synchronized, and when an event occurs at the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ously, now. A concord of consciousnesses is not inconceiv-
able. I cannot think that the deep-seated human sense of a
universal now can be confuted by a definition of time and
a canon of knowledge not its own (Einstein, I 1-2; Reichenbach, par. 19; Dingle, pp. 460 ff.).
3. In Plato's Sophist the debate between the proponents
of being and becoming is called the Battle of Gods and Giants. This battle rages between interpreters of relativity
theory and furnishes my last example of the difficulty of
extracting a clear philosophical interpretation from physical theory. The argument arises over the interpretation of
69
�the Minkowski diagram, which is a geometric representation of a world in which the space coordinates are interdependent with the time coordinates. A number of authors
claim that the relativization of simultaneity and the involvement or covariance of space and time so spoil the objectivity of the temporal order, that is, the unambiguous
and universal separation of past and future, that one can
no longer speak of becoming in the world. The world is a
four-dimensional continuum of three spatial and one "spa·
tializing" time coordinate, spatializing in the sense that in
this geometric diagram the motion of any substantial point
is represented by a stationary curve. This world is already
"written." It is and does not become, though it appears to
us successively, like a prepared cartoon strip we read by
moving our eyes. Thus the only change is that in the per·
ceiving consciousness of the observer, and if there is real
time it is only his psychological time.
The defenders of becoming argue, on the other hand,
that the perturbations of time pointed to by proponents of
being do not occur for causally related events, whose succession is preserved in all frames of reference; only the succession of causally unrelated and of simultaneous events is
relativized. So nothing, they claim, stands in the way of
positing real, that is, causally conditioned, becoming.
Aside from self-contradictory use of the term "being" to
mean static appearance and the too-narrow use of the
term becoming for causally related succession, the difficulty in drawing philosophical conclusions about time and
the world, even supposing the physicists came to terms,
seems to me to be that the interpretation really concerns
only the representation of the theory, that is, a model of its
world, not the world itself (Frazer, pp. 415 ff.; Whitrow,
pp. 227-228; Gruenbaum, Basic Issues, 195-228).
It seems that while the study of physical theory is indispensable to an understanding of process and motion, it
can be no more than suggestive with respect to time. But
that really implies that time properly speaking must belong not to nature but to the observer.
4. TEMPORAL SENSIBILITY
Sometimes it is the matter itself which arouses wonder
and perplexity, while sometimes the world's preoccupation with it excites curiosity and concern. In the case of
time the two motives for starting a study seem to me to
coincide.
There is certainly plenty of external evidence for our
world's pervasive fascination with time. In the decades
close to us there is no getting away from observations to
the effect that the rate of change of the human environment has increased stupendously, and this increase is usually expressed as a speeding up of time itself. "Innovation"
is the incantatory term which people feel they must utter
to keep time from outrunning them. Complementing this
70
general sense of the urgency of our situation there is also a
flood of scientific work on time; for example, intriguing biGllogical experiments on the temporal rhythms of animals
and jet-setters, psychological studies of time perception
and estimation, sociological accounts of time management
in different cultures (e.g., Zerubavel).
But this overwrought sense of time's power did not arise
only after the First World War. It had been in the offing,
one might say, for two millenia, but it first broke out
acutely almost two centuries ago, in Hegel's writings. It infected common opinion with the notion that the times are
informed by a supraindividual force whose laws human
science can divine and with whose ends human beings
must, on pain of merciless punishment, cooperate. There
was the widespread sense that this movement of time was
coming to a culmination, either in an earthly paradise or in
a man-made apocalypse. There was a passionate elevation
of personal time in its vitality over space in its dead externality (Bergson, Note 27, 3). There were discoveries of the
interdependence of space and time (Einstein, Alexander,
Note 6). And, as was to be expected, an irritated reaction
against this "time-mind" soon followed (Lewis, Note 7).
But most weightily, there was the claim that the philosophical situation of our time forces us to view the ground
of human being itself as temporal (Heidegger, Logik
p. 267).
Although cataloguing the elements and sources of what
everyone is saying is a dry and dubious business, I cannot
help speculating, or rather summarizing the speculation of
others, on how time, having been dethroned from its
mythical majesty by Aristotle, returned as the demon
force of modernity.
Four root references seem to me discernible, four
causes to which the temporal preoccupation oflate modernity is referrable.
First and fundamentally this preoccupation is the secular residue of Christianity. Christian time has a beginning,
an end, and an internal epoch. These are the Creation, the
Final judgment, and the birth of God as man. Our otherwise apostate world retains a secularized sense of impending doom, of a man-made catastrophe (which long antecedes the concrete fear of nuclear annihilation), and,
alternately, of coming salvation through progress toward a
divinization of mankind or a return to an original creaturely equality in a terrestrial paradise.
A second cause is the simple fact that we come late in
history, not in the sense in which Greek philosophers posited innumerably repeated cycles of the discovery and loss
of art and wisdom (Note 13), but because we have behind
us a minutely documented civilization, classical antiquity,
uniquely brilliant and irrevocably bygone, to which we
have a peculiar relation. For modernity begins with a selfconscious, systematic transformation of the classical categories of thought and conduct. Hence the shape of modern preoccupations is not quite intelligible without
reference to their ancient origins. At the same time we
SUMMER 1983
�seem to have every reason for forgetting those origins as
being superseded. For we have more power over nature
and are, in the modern West, better governed than were
our intellectual ancestors. Such forgetfulness, however, in·
duces a vague feeling of discontinuity and leaves us with
the contradiction of a chronic sense that our situation is
utterly new.
Third is the temporal effect that goes with the sheer
massiveness of modernity, its human numbers, informa·
tion, organizations, wars, crimes, and instruments of plea-
sure. The motion of magnitudes so far beyond human per·
spective appears to us to be attributable to an agency less
than divine and yet suprahuman; we call it time and con·
sider its effects inevitable.
Finally, and most to my purpose, is the special modern
propensity for a kind of psychological introspection which,
in contrast to philosophical self-knowledge, consists of a
prolonged pursuit of intimate affective subtleties. It seems
to me to stem from two sources coincidentally: from that
secularization of the anxious Christian interest in the salvation of one's soul which motivates Augustine's Confessions, and from that sophisticated reaction against the
early modern view that human subjectivity is ultimately
rational which is called romanticism and whose founding
work is Rousseau's Confessions (Note 7).
Naturally such introspection-it is really an ingenious
kind of musing-is especially rich in observations about
the sense of time and ready to luxuriate in the aroma of
temporality. Those of us who were born in the first third of
this century participate in these affects by birthright. For
then a sense of decadence and fin de siecle, climaxed by
the First World War which realized all the worst forebodings and indeed closed an era in civilization, had worked
the temporal sensibility into an acute state, which was the
psychological complement of the new interest in the physical time.
Three novelistic masterworks of the early century
which, although demandingly voluminous, found avid
readers, are at once a sign and a source of this sensibility:
The first is Proust's novel, literally entitled Toward a
Search for Lost Times. It is an account of the ennuiinfected author's quest for the catalyst of his art, which he
finds in the last part of the novel, Time Retrieved; it comes
in the form of an instantaneous, time-annihilating recovery of certain paradisical childhood moments. The second
is Mann's Magic Mountain. It is a book described by its author as intended to induce in the reader that same "subli-
learnedly interweaves mythical, historical, personal time;
the book is a recollection of European civilization.
•
•
•
Let me describe some of these experiences of temporality-a mere personal sample of temporal affections indicative of our time-under the interlaced rubrics of pacing,
routine, and skewing.
l. By "pacing" I mean the phenomenon that our internal time seems to undergo drastic shifts in tempo. We
moderns are so acutely subject to these, it seems to me,
because the rhythms of modern life are not long-breathed
natural periods, punctuated by public ritual, but tightly
scheduled stretches interrupted by private vacations. The
characteristically modern art forms, like the novel and
symphonic music, seem to me peculiarly expressive of our
habituation to sharp changes in pace. We moderns arealmost congenitally expert in the central temporal experience of the Magic Mountain-the periods of apathy, surfeit, distraction, and boredom which are long to live
through but vanishingly brief in retrospect, "wastes" of
time, poor in feature and welded in memory; they alternate with times of intense eventfulness, accomplished at
breakneck speed, while depositing memories so closepacked and vivid, that today seems aeons from yesterday.
A similar experience is that haunting sense of its expanded
or contracted availability which makes time seem like
money to be prodigally spent in one phase and anxiously
hoarded in another, always with a guilty sense that one's
lifetime is being mismanaged. Again there is that peculiarly modern drivenness which prevents us from ever
"having" time-and its complementary lethargy when the
possession of no amount of ''free" time avails: our time
devils either ride or bind us. There are, similarly, those occasions of wild anticipation when the present moment,
overburdened with the concentrated desire that time
should pass, stalls in a bad imitation of the "standing now"
of eternity, and will not give way to the next second. Then
again, though, time suddenly takes off and shimmies away,
as in periods of nervous distraction. Perhaps the latter affections are not peculiar to our time, but here is one that
surely is, the strangest and most characteristic of modern
time experiences: our watchful subjection to that ubiquitous little face on the wrist which, through all internal
tempi, equably shows the time. It is somehow, I suspect,
the cause of our loss of temporal equanimity.
mation of time," a warping of the sense of time in accor-
2. Next, ''routine": Routine is that organization of our
dance with the intensity of life, experienced by its solidly
bourgeois yet physically tainted young hero. The book
contains several phenomenological expositions of time, including a whole "Digression on the Time Sense." Finally
there is joyce's Ulysses, an Irish odyssey, whose hero is a
jew, an ordinary man and an outsider, who enacts within
one Dublin day the adventurous Mediterranean voyage
performed over a decade by his Homeric original. joyce
time economy which causes periods of time to be endlessly reflected as in facing mirrors, so that our memory
can scarcely discern whether it contains an infinity of
times or just one moment. Almost everyone who works in
the modern mode, according to a nonseasonal repeating
schedule, has some sense of the enigma of the timeconstrained round. How are such calendar days additive?
What memorable difference could be powerful enough to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
71
�distinguish each of the ten-thousand times of hastening up
these particular brownstone stairs at the sound of the bell
from every other? The memory is curiously cavalier about
the routines of life. It abstracts one event and remembers
that schema, modified by the mere knowledge of its multitudinous recurrence, its mere temporal heaping. The duties of each day, when done in the present, at the front of
time~ as it were, are vivid and absorbing enough, but when
we turn around to face the past an enigma stares back:
There has certainly been living but has there been a life,
that complete shape which the Greeks call bios, as distinct
from mere vital process, zoe? Can a temporally bureau era~
tized life become a whole unless the routine is no more
than the thorough-bass of some atemporal melody? Again,
the complement of clock-bound business is the vacation, a
vacancy of time, l{free" time, and this whole temporal con~
figuration of engaged and disengaged periods is subject to
a curious inversion of background and foreground, as in
certain optical illusions, such that work time, in which
life's energy is, after all, primarily invested, feels like the
mere backdrop to the periods of "off' time. No matter
how contentedly we are enmeshed in the cocoon of daily
absorption, let there be a break in busyness, and the inertia
which is strong in the scheduled spirit exerts itself to resist
not only all duties but all actions, and the released soul
drinks deep draughts of diversion.
3. uSkewing" is my term for the overpowering sense
which befalls us moderns especially in historical settings,
the sense that space and time can be at cross purposes. I
have been in Athens, at a place where my path crossed
that of Socrates, not conjecturally but precisely, since archaeology, that quintessentially modern discipline, has
fixed the exact location, for instance, of the court where
he was tried. Nor was I on the spot in plane coordinates
only, for again archaeology, which brings back the past by
digging down, had laid bare the level of his time. I was,
then, correctly located in all three spatial dimensions. I
was in the right place but at the wrong time. That melancholic sense of the irreparable loss of what we have never
had which is induced by written histories of bygone splendours-for histories induce memories of the never-experienced~that
temporal nostalgia, is many times intensified
when no space intervenes to compound the temporal distance, when here and now are directly at odds. It is, after
all, to bask in such melancholy that we visit "historic
spots."
The apprehension of this skewing of space and time invites much rumination. Take, for instance, the common
inverse experience of the case above: being contempora-
neous, even precisely simultaneous, with another cherished human being, but apart in space. How does the case
of spatial distance differ from temporal separation? Apparently by the fact that the latter seems to be remediable; by
an investing of available time in transversing space I can
come again into the other's presence~incidentally itself
the strangest business, this going into and out of another's
72
now! But is being in the same place at the same time so
certain a remedy for remoteness? Can it not equally be its
cause? Cannot the absent soul be more vividly a presence
than the present body? One writer on time illustrates the
common claim, that the feature which most distinguishes
present from past is vividness, by referring to his colleague
X who is, he asserts, more acutely there than Plato. I wonder, or rather I doubt it. On the other hand, there does
seem to be a special bond of awareness~ if only of disillusioned awareness~that links not only those who live in
neighbourly contiguity but also those who coexist in spatially distant contemporaneity.
To extend the speculation from spatial to temporal relocation: If it is sometimes, though perhaps rarely, possible
to go back to former places and presences, and to reenter
their continuity, why should it be an interdicted purpose-as the common opinion of our age considers it-to
go back to former times by internal recovery and an external reconstruction? Such a collective return, or rather re-
trieval, such a going back which means a bringing back,
has, after all, been attempted, and always these renaissance times are also the newest of times. Similarly, why
should not individual retrievals of our private lost times be
a possibility? That is, after all, Proust's project~just as the
Renaissance revives antiquity in grand vignettes, so Proust
relives his childhood in paradisical tableaus. Could it be,
indeed, that such retrievals of time, public or private, are
the modern replacements for the ancient periodic ritual
enactments of mythical moments~these being the respective modes of bringing the then and there into the
here and now and of undoing the skewing of time and
place?
I have only described some time affections which seem
to me particularly acute in modern life. But such diverse
musings while expressing the mood and providing the material for the inquiry into time have no end and lead to no
resolutions.
5. THE PHILOSOPHERS
What is left, in the end, for someone anxious to clarify
and test certain intimations about time, is the way through
the philosophers. It is, after all, their proper and specific
business to ask boldly and set out coherently what Time
itself is. The five writers I have chosen are those who seem
to me to present the most deep-reaching, well-grounded,
and mutually responsive thematic treatment of time.
Aristotle defines time as the number of motion. His is
the first thematic treatment in the West, unsurpassibly
comprehensive and therefore the natural reference for all
subsequent expositions.
Augustine, in his effort to comprehend the temporal
creature's relation to his eternal God and Creator, discovers time as the "distension" or worldly dimension of the
soul. His ardent and original inquiry first establishes temporality as at the root of human existence.
SUMMER 1983
�On this Augustinian discovery Huss.erl bases a phenomenology, namely a description, as presuppositionless as
possible, of the internal appearances of time, that is, of
time-consciousness.
·
Kant finds time to be the "inner sense," the sense in
which the self becomes an appearance to itself; here time,
as the form of human sensibility, is of the soul without belonging to the ultimate subject, the self.
Heidegger understands the very ground of human existence as temporality, inverting Kant's relation of the self to
time and driving the notion of time to its most extreme
distance from Aristotle.
There are, of course, other writers on time who are of
g<e><t stature. Of these my chief omission is Hegel, whose
writings, (except for the paragraphs on time in nature,
Note 27, 2) are just not capable of a dissevered thematic
treatment of time. For his system is the account of the
spirit in its necessary appearances which is Time. 8
Plotinus (20), Leibniz and Newton (4), Locke (24),
Nietzsche (13), Bergson (27, 3) and Whitehead (16 and 32)
are briefly treated in the Notes indicated. As for the absence of Plato, it is not really an omission because there is
no extended treatment of time in the Dialogues except in
myths (See Notes 12 and !3) and, significantly, none of
these are told by Socrates himself-whose images are reserved for the atemporal.
Finally, I should say that it is not so much the gist of the
theories here presented that is instructive for my purpose
but the exposition of their motives and principles, the tracing of their explicit and implicit consequences, and the
formulation of those oppositions and analogies which
mark them as belonging to one tradition. Using the texts in
that way, I shall in the last section (VI) try to formulate my
suspicions against time.
II. ARISTOTLE: TIME AS THE NUMBER OF MOTION
Time, Ghronos, is endowed among the Greeks with vividly various shapes and widely diverse, even opposite,
powers; he is monster, god, and heaven itself, all-seeing,
healing, and all-destroying9 Sophocles, for example, says
onoe that ".omnipotent time" confounds and destroys all,
and then again he calls him "a gentle god" (Oed. Col. 609,
Electra 179). Time's attributes are evidently fluid, but he is
always a potent being.
In the fourth book of the Physics, the first extensive thematic treatment of time, Aristotle suddenly and drastically
reduces it to the lowest possible status. This epoch-making
triumph of thinking over myth-making has not prevailed.
Indeed, the dethroned god has been resurrected as God
himself by Aristotle's modern counterpart, Hegel. So
much the more, it seems to me, should the overthrow accomplished by Aristotle be recalled.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
L TIME AND ITS MEASURES*
Aristotle begins with the suspicion that time is "either
wholly not, or scarcely and obscurely" (217 b 34). For many
perplexities arise if being is ascribed to time, chief of
which is that some of it is gone and is no longer, some of it
is to come and is not yet, while the now is no part of time
at all.
He resolves the difficulty like this: Time is a mere affection or aspect (pathos, hexis, 223 a 19) of motion: "Time is
the number of motion with respect to before and after" (220
a 25).
The Loeb translators comment that Aristotle "enters
into no profound metaphysical speculation as to its essential nature" (I, 378). But the profundity of his speculation
lies precisely in his showing that time has no essential nature; an interpretation of his treatment ought to show
what the deep-lying reasons for this determined trivialization of time are.
Not only is time a mere aspect of motion for Aristotleit is not even a necessary aspect, since not all motions are
temporal. Two kinds of motion at least are prior to time.
They are the motions at the two limits of the natural
world, so to speak, and they are timeless because they are
themselves the source and principle of time. The first is
the ultimate, primary rotational motion of the heavens,
the second is the motion of the soul apprehending time. I
shall say more of these later, but I must mention right now
that to identify these motions as pretemporal is by no
means to say that they cannot be timed. We can clock the
heavens and we can time our cogitations-but we have
clocks only because of the regular continuous motions of
the heavens, and we can tell time only because of the
counting motion of our soul. Time is the measure of motion, and therefore motion can in turn measure time (220 b
24).
Up to the last book the Physics is about inner-worldly
motions and these alone are the motions affected with
time, the number of motion according to before and after.
Where there is no physical body, there is no time (On the
Heavens 279 a 16). Motion (kinesis) includes every kind of
change (metabole) of quantity, quality, place, and the process of becoming (2!8 b 21, though not becoming as simple coming into being, Met. 1067 b 32). How can motion
possess number, that is, come in ordered units?
Motion has a quantitative aspect; it is a magnitude; we
may say that it has extension. Motion derives its sequential
extended character of before-and-after from this aspect
which is merely a property in the motion although separable in thought (2!9 a 22; see Loeb I p. 384, n.b.). (Strictly
speaking, as we shall see, the motion derives its magnitudinal property from the thing moved, the mobile.) In other
*The section on Aristotle was worked out during a year of learning with
and from Anderson Weekes, then a senior at St. John's College, Annapolis, who during that time developed a coherent and illuminating account
of Aristotle's theory of cognition.
73
�words, the category of continuous quantity is predicated
which includes them (Met. 1078 a 12); therefore physics is
of motion.IO
a subordinate science, and not Science simply, as it is with
To say that time moves is meaningless; rather motion is
temporal, and from motion time derives all its properties
and problems. As motion is continuous, so is time, and all
the problems continuity offers to reason, time does likewise. First among these is its relation to the now, which is
analogous to that of a point to its line. More of that later. A
second difficulty is that since motion is continuous, so is
us.
Locomotion, then, is prior in all ways to the other motions. Of locomotions, rotary motion alone is continuous
in all senses: It has no beginning and it does not end
through having completed its process, nor does it abruptly
double back on itself; it can be regular, smooth, uninterrupted, and eternal (Phys. VIII 8-9).
The first heavenly sphere is the uniquely perfect embodiment of such rotary motion. It comes as close to being
at rest as a mobile can be, since every point in a circular
motion is equally a beginning, middle, and end, so that in a
certain sense it has no before-and-after (265 b 1). It is in
motion, but not toward an end; its movement is rather a
steady state which imitates in its regularity the pure activity of completely fulfilled being, God (Met. XII 7). This is
the motion which is the cause of all other inner-worldly
motions, and so, indirectly, of time (Phys. VIII 9). 12 Beyond
the heavens there is no time (On the Heavens 279 a 15).
The continual character of time, its endlessness and its
uninterruptedness, is therefore derived from that of the
ultimate motion. Because of the heavenly motion, time is
one and the same throughout the world (Phys. 218 b 14).
The discontinuous motions of the terrestrial world, which
come to an end with the reaching of their goal, are all fit-
time: Whence, then, come the unit measures, the periods,
through which time can become the number of motions?
Time, therefore, pertains to motion insofar as motion
is a continuous quality or quantity, which always has a
before-and-after. The primary before-and-after, according
to Aristotle, is that of place (219 a 16), and therefore locomotion is in all ways the primary motion: It is the condition of all other motions, and it is the motion of a completed being, and it is temporally prior to other motions
since it initiates them (VIII, 7). But it would be false to conclude that motion is continuous because it is spatial, as if it
were the covering of extended space by an indifferent
point-mobile. That would be an importation of the modern physical view that a motion is sufficiently understood
through its "quantity," which is called momentum and defined as the measure of the mass multiplied by the velocity
of the moving body. Aristotle rejects the possibility of a
motion indifferent to the nature of the mobile and its
proper places.l 1 Indeed, as was said, motion itself is defined in terms of the mobile, as its state. He says clearly
that motion is continuous because the thing moved is continuous and not because that in which it is moved is so
(Coming to Be 337 a 27). He does not, of course, mean the
continuity of the present extent of the thing, for example,
its length, but rather that continuity which a mobile has by
reason of possessing a matter which remains continuous
through change, the substrate or subject of the motion
(Met. 1042 a 32, 1044 b 7). The magnitude of motion,
and derivatively of time, is an affection of a divisible subject which is not the momentary present movable thing
itself but "what was moved" (Met. 1020 a 32), which must
mean the mobile in its progressive changes of place. In this
continuing-through-its-phases the mobile displays that extension which is reflected in the motion and which, when
counted, is called temporal durations. In brief: what is
countable in motion is its continuously phased development, its "before-and-after."
It should be noted here that, accurately speaking, the
magnitudinal affections are so-called "proper affections";
they belong to the mobile not essentially but yet necessarily, just as a human being is not essentially either a male or
a female and yet is necessarily one of these. Temporal duration is therefore not of the essence of the mobile. From
this fact follows the crucial distinction between Aristotelian and modern physics: To Aristotle the science that
leaves out motion and magnitude is closer to essences,
more intelligible, and therefore more accurate than that
74
ted into continuous cosmic time. And since everything
within the world is mobile and subject to timing, time is in
everything (223 a 17).
As the heavens are the source of temporal continualness, so they provide the measure of time. The cycle of
rotation is the best unit of time, because it is easiest to
count (223 b 19)-a continuous quantity must have a unit
measure in order to be countable.
The unit measures of time in the terrestrial world of becoming are provided by the sun's oblique motion along the
ecliptic. just as the movement of the whole heaven is responsible for the continuity of motion and time, so the
sun, the "generator," by its approaches and withdrawals
causes each life to have its span: "Every life and time is
measured by a period, though not the same for all .... For
some the measure is a year, for some a greater and for oth-
ers a lesser period" (On Coming to Be 336 b 13 ff.). Hence
the period or cycle is the natural time unit (Phys. 223 b 28).
God has made this somewhat irregular but uninterrupted
cycle of becoming perpetual so that it may come as near as
possible to eternal being (3 36 b 35); becoming approaches
being in a kind of Eternal Return.l 3 To tell continuous
time over such annual cycles it would seem necessary that
each cycle should differ somewhat from the next, as, because of the accidents of matter, it certainly will be.
Time, then, belongs, strictly speaking, only to the sublunar world of change, of becoming and of linearly advancing motion in which before and after are distinguishable.
Such motion, defined in Physics III (201 a 11), 14 is to be
understood through Aristotle's two fundamental terms,
SUMMER 1983
�potentiality or capability for being (dynamis) and actuality,
activity, or being-at-work (energeia; also' entelecheia, fulfillment). Motion, then, is the fulfillment of a capability; it is
the actual exercise of the potentiality that the mobile has
for being what it was meant to be, for achieving its full
form (eidos). Each motion is a unity, governed by its own
end and ceasing when that end has been fulfilled. Its time
is just the measured course of this activity of approaching
full being. Since a terrestrial mobile, unlike the heavens
(On the Heavens I, 3), has a corruptible material substrate
and is subject to accidents, it cannot hold its perfected
state. If it is an animal it will instead have generated a new
animal, different in number but the same with itself in
form. And so as a member of the species it will participate
in eternity, in spite of the temporary life of each generation (On the Soul 415 b 4). Such generating is the terrestrial complement to the work of the generating sun: "Man
is begotten by man and by the sun" (Phys. 194 b 13). The
father as progenitor comes before the child in time, but
because he contributes the form toward which the child is
moving he is prior not only in time but also in being.
That toward which as an end the motion is, the actuality, is prior in dignity (Met. 1050 a). This priority is timeless. When a moving thing has come to the state of beingat-its-own-end or fulfillment it straightaway cuts out of the
continuum of time and becomes, with respect to its being,
timeless. What is actual, fully in being, is present (hypdrchon, 1048 a 32), in a state imaginable as a kind of motionless vibrancy. One must say of it that it has been and is at
once (1048 b 24); it is not temporally determinable or articulable. But just as for pure eternal objects "to be while
time is is not the same as to be in time" (Phys. 221 a 19), so
worldly things which are composites of form and material
can have temporal duration in their actuality. For their
having come into their own form does not preclude their
informed material from being in time. Thus the men of
Troy cannot be said to be either before or after us with
respect to their form, and yet the Trojan War in which
they served certainly occurred long before our day (Problemata 916 a 18 ff.).IS
It is just because every motion is one and terminates in
its own end that time is powerless as a cause. For this end
is always discontinuous with the motion that leads up to it.
Aristotle separates the concluding moment as no longer
belonging to the motion but to its completion and fulfillment (Phys. 263 b 15). So while a motion and its time are
yet in process, none of the moments of this continuous
span is determinate or complete enough to be the sufficient cause of the next moment. When mere time intervenes between a cause and its end, that is, when the mo~
lion is not a completed unity, the end is merely contingent
(Post. An. II 12). Thus, while a cause may be in time, it can
never act through mere time: That means that there is no
mechanical causation, which is a causation where each
momentary state fully determines the next. Furthermore,
Aristotle notes that the mere lapse of time is never responTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sible for a thing being made new or beautiful. If anything,
we say that time destroys, but only because motion itself
is, from one perspective, "ekstatic" (a word Heidegger will
raise to central importance), that is to say, it is a destabilization and a "standing forth" from the status quo (Phys. 221
b 1; 222 b 17).
Time is but the number of motion-the objective number, the countable parts themselves (219 b 9). Motion is
potentially numerable, but it has an actual number or becomes temporal only when it is actually counted.
It is the soul that counts motion. How? By noting
change, of course. When we have no awareness of change,
as during sleep, we say that no time has passed, for we fit
the earlier directly onto the later now (218 b 26). (Because
of the continuity of motion the opposite case, that there
should be no change to perceive, is apparently impossible.)
So time depends on distinguishing nows.
2. THE NOW
If time is thought of on the analogy of a continuous directed line whose parts have an intrinsic order (though of
position rather than of before-and-after, Cat. 5 a 30), the
now corresponds to a Euclidean point, namely a point
which is not a constituent element of a line but merely lies
upon it (Elements, Def. 4). For the now, Aristotle is at
pains to show, is not a part of time but its very Hcontinuity" (220 a 19, 222 a 10), at once the pivotal link of beforeand-after and the possibility of temporal division. This
mathematized now reproduces whatever perplexities a
mathematical point raises, and so, since time depends on
motion and motion on the continuous magnitude of the
mobile (219 a 12), time shares all the problems of geometric continuity. For example, the nows are the limits of segments of time without belonging to time and are therefore
not attainable by dividing time, just as the point is a partless element which indefinite divisions of a line approach
but do not reach. Further, the now is always the same in
function but never in "position" (219 b 16), just as any
point which produces a cut in the line is indistinguishable
from another except by location; similarly, as a point divides a line everywhere potentially, but actually only when
a cut is made, so the now does not divide time actually
until a temporal cut is made.
How is that temporal cut made? As time accompanies
motion, so the now hovers, as it were, over the moving
thing (219 b 24 ff.) It is by the now alighting on an object
that before-and-after in motion are first distinguished, for
"the now is most apprehensible." We conclude that the
now must be the presentness of the perception 16 of a moving thing, and that the cut in time is made by the act of
perceptual attention to a moving object: "Perception is
necessarily of a this and a where and a now" (Post. An. 87 b
30). Perception is "an innate distinguishing power" (99 b
36) which is actualized by the external and the particular
75
�(On th~ Soul417 b 21), and the now-cut in time is actualized with it
But, on the other hand, how can there be perception of
the point-now? If perception itself takes time, then how
can it cut time except in time, which means, not at a now.
But if, on the other hand, perception as the activity of the
faculty of sensation (On the Soul II 5,12) is, like all actuality, essentially not in time (though it can be accompanied
by time), then what does it have to do with the now which
makes the temporal cut? What Aristotle says of the activity
of pleasure exemplifies this problem: "It is a kind of whole
in the now" (Nic. Eth. 1174 b 9; a !4)l7 Is this psychic now
which is capable of atemporal substantial fulness formally
identical with the now of physical time? Similarly for perception: What is perceived in the soul's now is the atemporal actuality of the object-the soul perceives its form
through the sensing of its shape. How then can the soul
simultaneously perceive the partless point-now of the mobile's temporal extension? Aristotle does not say. He does
indeed try to make provision for the perception of lengths
of time (see below, 3). But even then it will not be clear
how the soul cuts time, and this is a crucial difficulty since
"time is what is determined by the now" (Phys. 219 a 30). It
is this difficulty which later philosophers solve by taking
time into the soul so that the now becomes identical with
its noting.
When the soul has pronounced "now" twice (however it
does so), namely before and after a motion-stretch, we say
that a certain time has passed (2!9 a 28). Since time is that
by which motion has number, it must be possible to count
the stretch between the termini, which requires reference
to a standard measure. We have, as was shown, such uni-
versal measures given us by the heavenly spheres: days by
the revolution of the starry sphere, years and seasons by
the sun, months by the moon. With these natural passages
and their more minute subdivisions we compare the
stretch of time and, counting the bounding nows-for the
now corresponds to the unit in number (221 a 16)-we
count the substretches which they mark off.
There is no time without soul, for time arises where
countable motion is actually counted, and only a soul, by
means of the perceptive intellect (nous) can count (223 a
23 ff.). What, then, is counting?
We must cast loose completely from latter-day Kantian
notion that counting is the articulation of an inner stream
of consciousness, an internal time-flux. The soul, for Aris-
totle, has no original psychic time because it has no one
continuous underlying flow or motion; nor does thought
run through or touch on a continuum as it counts: "The
motion of reason is not a continuum and in an underlying
matter, as is that of a moving thing" (On Invisible Lines
969 a 32). When the soul thinks time it does not actually
run through the temporal continuum but takes its sections
atomically, as it thinks its successive thoughts discretely,
like numbers (On the Soul430 b 7, 407 a 9).
The soul, locomotive, affective, or rational, cannot well
be said to be in physical motion (408 a 34 ff.)lS But in some
76
other manner, never quite defined, it must be spoken of as
moving. For example, thinking is motion for "without continuity and time it is impossible for us to think even those
things which are not in time" (On Memory 450 a 8). Coming to know is a motion for it requires experience, repeated
and remembered perceptions through which the universal
is suddenly established (Post. An. !00 a 3 ff.). The attaining
of a good condition takes time, for the human intellect,
being composite, needs a continuous approach to perfec-
tion (Met. 1075 a 9). So there are psychic motions, but they
are discontinuous, in fact in two ways: Motion is not al-
ways present and each motion proceeds discretely. I think
it can be shown that the human soul does have an everpresentness, namely its first actuality, analogous to the unintermittent thought of the pure intellect, but it is not the
continuity of an ever-advancing, ever-incomplete homoge-
neous flux. The continuity of time is entirely external and
physical. Its source is the heavenly local motion with
which the intermittent inner motion of the soul has only
this in common-that it, too, must be in a strict sense ach-
ronic; for how, without infinite regress, will the soul count
its own counting? 19
3. MEMORY
Without the now, then, there is no time, and no time
without a now (2!9 b 34), but as we have seen, the now is
not a part of time. Indeed its mode of being is quite different from that of time, which is to say that it comes under a
different category. Time belong, to the category of "how
great" or quantity; the now belongs to the category of
"when" (Cat. 2 a 2, 11 b 12) along with "yesterday" and
~~tomorrow." Except for an isolated chapter on the usage
of ''when" words, nothing is said of this latter category in
the Physics nor is it elucidated in the Categories. This most
significant and strange disjunction of time and the now is
implied by Aristotle's problematic theory of the role duration plays in perception and perceptible being: The perceptive intellect comes into contact with the continuously
moving physical world always at a here and a now; the here
may stay put, but the now passes orr along with the motion, and from that, derivatively, arises the perception of
time. But the now has another relation to time besides
generating its perception: Each present now forms an im-
penetrable limit between all the nows that have passed
and all the nows that are to come (234 a 1). Or perhaps
since there are, strictly speaking, no past and future nows,
one should say that the now separates time before from
time after.
Therefore there is a past-or rather, we humans have a
past (as do certain animals, On Mem. 450 a 15). The inanimate physical world has no past or future, although it has a
before-and-after, which simply means that it is in a prior or
a posterior phase of its approach to being. Nor has God a
past, for having no sensory perception he has no now.
How then is it possible for us to have a past, that is to
SUMMER 1983
�say, passed nows? Aristotle deals with this most humanly
interesting of temporal problems, the triune character of
the category "when," in the brilliant little essay On Memory and Recollection. We know even beforehand that we
must have a capacity for retaining nows drained of present
perception. Without such an ability we could not tell time,
since we could not interpret what we had counted up. Nor
could we learn, since we could accumulate no experience.
For it is many memories which make one experience, and
memory is of past perception (Post. An. 100 a 4).
About the three "whens" Aristotle says succinctly: "Of
what is present, there is perception, of what is to come,
expectation, of what has been, memory" (On Mem. 449 b
28).
The present (paron, being-at-hand) is the perceptionfilled now. It is immediate: Of the now in the now there
can be no memory (449 b 26). Enough has been said of it.
Heidegger will subject it to a fundamental critique.
It is. the imagination which makes the two non-present
phases of time possible. The future arises when the soul,
in present deliberation about what is to be, projects images
(On the Sou/431 b 8). Aristotle observes that we appear to
face into the future since the before of the past is more
remote from the now than the after, while the before of
the future is closer (Phys. 223 a 9). But beyond that he
treats the future mostly from the logical point of view, asking what it might mean to speak now the truth about what
will be. For if futural assertions are always either true or
false, just like assertions about past and present, then contingency and chance are excluded-the future is determinate. But that cannot be, since both human choice and the
vagaries of matter work to make future events contingent.
So while it is certainly necessary that tomorrow there must
be a seafight or not, it is impossible to say which ofthese is
the case (On Interp. 9). Therefore, in order to judge of future propositions, one must know which things will be by
necessity (either because they are part of a necessary cycle
of becoming, Post. An. 95 b 38 ff., or because they are always or never), and what things are within human choice.
Then one can say either "it will be" or "it is expected" (to
esti, to mellon, Coming to Be 337 b 3 ff.), knowing that
these sentences really refer to two different futures-the
foreknown and the merely anticipated.
But Aristotle never intimates that there is anything in
the future as future, some innovation or fulfillment to be
credited to mere futurity. What will be necessarily in the
future is what has already always been (Note 13). Even human affairs run in cycles: "It is likely that art and philosophy have often been discovered as far as possible and perished again" (Met. 1074 b II). So the future is of no great
interest to him. It will be otherwise with Augustine to
whom prophecy, as the foreknowledge of the apparently
contingent, is a serious matter, and with Heidegger for
whom the future will become the spring of time itself.
It is the past which Aristotle treats most significantly.
There is a past because there is memory and memory is a
mode of the imagination. There is a kind of motion in the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
soul, resulting from the activity of perception, by which
we have images (On the Sou/429 a 3). No human being, as
a composite of matter and form, can think without images;
for example, one cannot do geometry without at least internal diagrams. For the image is an accommodation of
material objects to the thinking soul, a holding of their
form and their continuity without their matter; the human
intellect needs this form to go to work (On Mem. 450 b 31
ff.).
Memory and imagination, then, both belong to the
same part of the soul, that "primary organ" of perception
which receives deliverances incidental and common to all
the senses, namely magnitude, motion, and, consequently,
time (450 a 8 ff., On the Sou/425 a 14 ff.). Memory is the
affection of this power when time has gone by (On Mem.
449 b 26), a kind of perception perpetuated past its cause.
All things imaginable can be remembered (450 a 24); indeed it is hard to think what sense-derived image would
not be, strictly speaking, a memory, since all images arise
from perception as soon as the actual sensing in the sense
organ has ceased.
Only what is no longer present can be remembered. But
how is that possible? Aristotle never tells haws imagining
works, except by analogy. He likens a memory-image to a
seal impression, a simile which expresses the crux of his
difficulty: Imaging compounds the mystery of perception:
how can a material somatic organ receive the physical object extendedly and yet immaterially (On the Soul424 a 18
ff., 427 b 29 ff.)-and then hold it through time ready for
recovery?
But he does tell what it means to be an image. The memory recovers the perceptual trace or memory-image in the
soul. However it is not the image we remember but the
thing itself, and therein lies a problem. Aristotle resolves it
by pointing out that that is just what it means to be an
image: to be all in one an affection present in the soul and
a likeness of an object, just as a picture is before us both as
a physical object and as a likeness of a person. Aristotle is
here prefiguring one of Husserl's central conceptions, that
of "intentionality," which is the defining characteristic of
consciousness as always consciousness of something.
We have a past, then, by virture of memory, and we
have memory by virtue of our threefold receptive power.
These are its facets: I. perception (aisthesis), which is responsible for the actual present sensory event; 2. imagina-
tion (phantasia), which is the capability of being affected
by the continuities of place and motion abstracted from
their matter; and 3. memory (mneme), which permits retention of images and their revival together with an awareness of the time elapsed since perception (452 b 23). Aristotle supplies a not quite intelligible explanation of how
such elapsed times are gauged (452 b 7 ff.): Just as one estimates a great external object not by actually reaching for it
but by representing it in a proportionate figure in the field
of the imagination, so one does not actually go back a long
time to estimate the age of a memory-image, but one represents it proportionately in a speeded-up motion-for ex-
77
�ample, by running through a decade in a second. What is
hard to see is how such a scaling of time can given more
than a very impressionistic comparative judgement of its
length, since temporal extent cannot be panoramically surveyed in the imagination-for it does not appear-so as to
give some sense of a scaling factor. As I have said, the chief
difficulty in Aristotle's account of time is his insistence
that duration itself can be perceived and imaged.
Aristotle, nonetheless, summarizes: "Only those animate beings who perceive time remember, and by that
part by which they perceive time" (449 b 29). This might
seem to be a circular outcome: We have a past, because we
have memory and memory because we have a sense of
passed time. Yet with all its difficulties it sets the terms for
future debate-the past can be only for animate beings
who have an imagination with a temporal dimension, that
is, memory.
What is entirely missing in Aristotle's founding account
is any sense that our triple temporality is humanly significant. The reason for this omission is that not time but
timeless actuality is life in the full sense. This view is
plainly expressed in this passage from the Nichomachean
Ethics, which may serve as an epigraph:
Pleasant is the activity of the present, the hope of what is to
come, the memory of what has been. But what is truly pleasant and lovable in these is their being in the way of actuality.
[IX 1168 a 13]
*
*
*
The vulnerable places in this magnificently detailed and
dovetailed theory of time which can be culled from Aristotle's various works are patent. They occur, I have argued, at its outer and its inner termini: the continuous ce-
lestial revolution which is the cause of all motion and the
perceptual now, which is the point of tangency of natural
motion and the soul. Happily the central thesis, the reduction of time to an affection of motion, is not, I think, exclusively bound into Aristotle's terms. (See Sec. VI 2.)
Before going on to Augustine, who fully makes good
Aristotle's lack of temporal pathos, let me at least refer to
the intervening grand psycho-cosmological theory of the
Neoplatonist Plotinus. (It is briefly sketched in No~e 20.).
Ill. AUGUSTINE:
TIME AS THE ''DISTENTION''
OF THE SOUL
Time and the soul's temporality is transfigured in acreated world. Augustine burns with curiosity, expressed in
ardent language, to know how the temporal human creature can reach beyond creation to the creator so as to find
God's will "before" the world. He begins by throwing out
78
an impetuous barrage of time quandaries and reflections
(Confessions, XI 14-19). What is time? How can there be a
•past when what is gone is now no longer and what will be is
not yet? And yet, did the present not pass, it would be eternity. Again, how can I say that is, whose cause of being is
that it shall be? And how can I measure times when those
gone are no longer and those to come are not yet available?
If! do it, it must be while it is passing. But then what of the
Hthree times"-how can I preserve them concurrently?
Augustine thus begins, in some faith of getting satisfaction, with just those questions which Aristotle cites as perplexities arising from the error of giving time substantial
being. In the course of his passionate inquiry some truths
do come clear to Augustine. He thinks he can affirm boldly
that if nothing were passing there would be no past time; if
nothing were coming, no future; if nothing were, no
present. So there must be a motion of the world; God's
creation has passage. Further he sees that he always faces
time: It does not come up from behind and out of the past,
and he cannot, like Aristotle, go along with it, but 1it comes
toward him from the future. As Aristotle, in Greek, calls
the past "that which has become" (gen6menon), so Augustine calls it what has gone by (praeteritum). For there is a
real future, not merely a necessitating cyclical return, but
events-to-be, contingent to human apprehension, yet revealed to the prophets through God's omniscience. A real
future is the human consequence of God's foreknowledge.
However he approaches the perplexity, Augustine is
sure of this-and here begin his wonderful resolutionsthat past, present, and future, wherever they are to be
found, are only as present (20). There are not, properly
speaking, three times (Aristotle's "whens") called past,
present, and future. Rather there is Ha present of what is
past, a present of what is present, and a present of the future."
Such three are indeed in our soul (anima) and elsewhere I do
not see them. The present of what has gone by is memory,
the present of what is present, eyewitness (contuitus), the
present of what is future, expectation. [20]
Augustine is not describing an Aristotelian faculty for
sensing what is before us, for reviving images with their
accrued times and for projecting them in planning. He is
speaking of time itself, and he is placing it within the human soul.
The problem of measuring this psychic time leads him
on (21-22). His mind "is set afire" by it, by the burning
perplexity of the dispersal of time into its three phaseshow to lay them together for comparison, in what space, in
what dimension to do the measuring. For time is not the
measure of a motion but what is itself to be measured:
While the sun stood still, time yet went on for Joshua.
'jNew," he exclaims, "is the discovery of these things!"
The discovery is this: "In you, my mind (animus), do I measure my times" (27). Times can be measured in the mind
SUMMER 1983
�because they are co-present there, and hence comparable.
Thus is resolved the great puzzle of primary time measurement: unlike a length of space whose rigid measure can be
transported intact and made congruent with another
Expectation
(Future)
length, times and their measures flow away and are incapa~
Eyewitness
(<Present)
ble of superimposition. (One must keep in mind that
clocks measure and compare times only derivatively,
through motion.): But in the soul times do coexist.
The soul's collection of all times into its present proceeds, I infer, as follows. Worldly motion passes, so to
speak, under the attentively apprehending soul. The soul
perceives each moment as it goes past and absorbs it into
its own temporal dimension, its memory. Thus the now
remains fixed in its context but sinks ever further down as
<t - - - - - - - ....-------~motion
~o<:-
..,e~"'
~+
Past
(memory)
new moments of motion are perceived. At the same time
that the soul remembers, and at the same juncture of the
world's motion and the soul's present, it also expects. The
difference between remembering and expecting is only
this, that whereas present moments drop into memory, future moments drop, as it were, out of the dimension of expectation into the world.
The future, therefore, is not a long time, for it is not, but the
long future time is merely a long expectation of the future.
Nor is the time past a long time, for it is not; but a long past
time is merely a long memory of past time. (28]
Augustine has referred to this co-temporaneity of the
times as being in the mind. But now he goes further. Time
is the dimension of the soul. Here is how Augustine puts it:
" ... It seems to me that time is nothing else but a stretching out in length," [distentio is his word] "but of what I
know not, and I marvel if it be not of the very mind" (26).
Note that here time is not in the mind but it is the mind, or
rather the dimension of the mind: The soul is the "space
of time," that is to say it is drawn out into a temporal longitude along which memories, perception, and expectations
are copresently arrayed.
This "distention" can therefore be visualized as a kind
World 1 s
indeed implicit in Augustine's understanding that the external creation has events but no temporal succession; it is
the world as God sees it, all at once. It is the "standing
now" (11) which becomes fluid only to the finite creature:
Whatever God doth, it shall be forever .... That which hath
been is now, and what is to be hath already been, and God
requireth what is to be. [Ecclesiastes iii 14-15)
Second is the real futurity of the projections and previsions of the expectation segment; prophesies, as Godgiven visions of what is to be, meet their own realizations
in the world, when the moment of their juncture with it
arrives.
Finally, the diagram points to the plenitude of memory
for Augustine. He has indeed already devoted a most beautiful book (X) to its power, its "ample and infinite inwardness (penetrale)," its "fields and spacious palaces," whence
he can make present to himself by their images things he
has seen and learned, including himself as he was, and
which he traverses to come to God (8, 9, 17, 25).
hori~
Augustine's passionate interest in temporality has its
zontal axis represents the world's motion coming from the
reason in his faith. He wants to discover the condition under which a temporally dispersed being can approach
union with God. Having collected time from what might
be called its horizontal extension into the vertical dimension representing the cotemporaneity of the phases of
time, he has achieved a human present which is analogous
to God's "standing now." But he prays further that his
of vertical elongation, an ordinate in a diagram. The
future towards the soul's "eyewitness." That moment is
the origin, the perceptual present, where the soul's "distention" intersects, or sits astride, the world's motion and
turns its sensation~events into memory images. These con-
tinually drop down, preserving the order of entry, into the
memory segment of the soul's distention, falling deeper
with every passing moment. At the same juncture expecta-
tion or foreknowledge is drawn down from the upper segment to meet the real moment, to become realized in a
perceptual present. The whole ordinate, the expectation
and memory segment joined in the point of perception,
constitutes the soul's triune present.
The diagram expresses three significant elements of
Augustine's temporality. First, since time is the soul's vertical dimension, the world's horizontal axis is timeless. It is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
soul's stretching apart, its "distention"-William Watt's
vivid translation of 1631 says "distraction" (Loeb)-should
be gathered in, so that he might be not stretched apart in
time (distentus) but stretched forth (extentus), not in distraction (secundum distentionem) but in concentration (secundum intentionem) toward the delights of the eternal father "which are neither to come nor to pass away" (29).
This "extention" out of and beyond the world is represented by the third dimension in the diagram.
79
�Temporality, then,· is the wordly dimension of the created soul, namely its capacity fm taking in and containing
the world, that is, was, and will be. And so time is also the
soul's ~~distraction."
HUSSERL: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF
TIME
Husserl's abstruse, intricate, and subtle description of
the sense of time, The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness, begins with the praise of Augustine as the
unsurpassed master of the problem of time. Indeed,
Augustine's "distention" furnishes Husserl with his guiding schema, and Husserl may be regarded as Augustine's
expositor, with this difference: Husserl's analysis is intended to require no act of faith or philosophical thesis at
all since he aims to write a phenomenology, a presuppositionless description of the phenomena of temporality·and
of temporal appearances. He therefore requires a rigorous
"abstention" from all substantializing assumptions.· He
suppresses what might be called ontological greed, not in
order to gaze about aesthetically, but to develop a penetrating analytic insight into the deep constituting structures of phenomena seen as phenomena, namely as they
appear to consciousness. To put time before oneself
strictly as a phenomenon hence requires the exclusion of
objective or world time insofar as its existence is posited,
and a transfer of attention to the fundamental phenomenon of immanent time, the flow of consciousness from
now to now. This flow is the "temporally constitutive
flux," the "originary" stream, in which temporal phenomena and, remarkably, the consciousness of time itself are
simultaneously constituted (par. 39). In the end, to be sure,
this flux is interpreted as consciousness itself, as absolute
subjectivity or self (36). But that is a leap beyond simple
phenomenology, forced by the irrepressible human need
for more than merely descriptive accounts.
The early section, entitled "The Analysis of TimeConsciousness," is, however, rigorously phenomenological, and from it I shall sketch some findings: apt new coinages, illuminating discriminations, and, as the centerpiece,
a diagrammatic synthesis of the elements found in the
analysis.
which Aristotle had left unresolved, namely how anything
can be perceived in the partless point-now, the so-called
"specious present," an unintelligible notion of a finite, en-
during now, had been introduced, 21 but Husserl admits no
such constructs.) How is an appearance, say of a melody,
which develops over time as a unified object, to be understood?
The term "intentionality" was mentioned in reference
to Aristotle's understanding of the memory-image as an
image of a thing. Husserl develops intentionality into an
indispensable element in the description of consciousness.
Consciousness is always also consciousness of something:
it is always intentional. "Truly . . . it pertains to the essence of the intuition of time that in every point of its duration ... it is consciousness of what has iust been and not
mere consciousness of the now-point of the objective
thing ... " (12). Every now-consciousness is also a yetConsciousness, like a comet's tail of a previous perception.
Thus besides the veritable perception, the content present
in consciousness in its own right, there is also a consciousness of the time gone by-not a faded perception but
something quite different: a past tone present as a past
tone. This mode is distinct from ordinary memory, and
Husserl calls it retention, or primary memory. It is the consciousness in the present of what has just been, discovered
through the analysis of the phenomenal fact that an experience has duration within the immediately superseded
now. Every present impressional consciousness ''shades
off" into an everfresh retentional consciousness of the
temporal object's immediate past. But when the spring of
tonal impressions gives out, the melody is over and sinks
back to a vanishing point, p;:tssing into ordinary, or secondary, memory.
Secondary memory is distinguished from primary, or retentive, memory by these features: Perception has the distinguishing character of ''self-givenness" which means
that it stands there, uncalled-for, in its own right. So too is
"originary" time-consciousness self-given, for one cannot
inhibit time's running-off. What we can do is to re-produce
or re-present sections of temporal experience. Husser! em-
ploys the term "representification" (Vergegenwaertigung),
"making present again" (Appendix II). Retention, then,
yields the immediate past which is present; memory yields
the remoter past which must be made present again. Husserl makes numerous other acute observations about
memory phenomena (See Note 22).
Memory is a mode which posits, that is to say, requires, a
1. RETENTION
Although each now is a source of fresh perception and
the spring of the living present, temporally enduring objects are not perceived in a pointillistic mode, but in longer
presences. This is a fact of temporal phenomena seen as
phenomena. They have enduring presence, even though
the flux of time has an instantaneous leading edge. (To
overcome the perplexity associated with this observation,
80
previous perception. The intentional reaching for the past
is fulfilled in the presentification of a perception which is
no longer self-given. The phenomenon of memory as a
whole is precisely that of a present givenness of the past as
past -but it is no longer a question for phenomenology
how the past can be.
Thus the present is characterized by perception, the
past by an ''intention" or a reaching for a previous perception, and the future by a ''protention," that is, an expectaSUMMER 1983
�tion of fulfillment in a perception to come. Protention is
therefore inverted memory: Perception, succeeds pro ten·
tion but precedes memory (24-28).
The vertical axis F'EP'O' stands for Augustine's "distention" of the mind, namely present consciousness encompassing perception, memories, and expectation. Into
2. THE DIAGRAM OF TIME
Husserl's famous "Diagram of Time" (10) displays the
phenomena of these three phases of time in their conjunction with the phenomenon of the "running off" or cours-
ing of time in a coordinate schema which had been suggested by William James (Ch. XVII, end). One might say
that it accomplishes the junction of Aristotle's two distinct
categories of "when" and of ~jhow much," or duration.
Husser! is careful to state that the diagram is not a representation of objects as they appear in time, that is, of temporal appearances, but rather of the phenomenon of temporality itself.
Here is an elaborated composite version of Husserl's
schemata:
+r•
1
1\
' '\
\
''
and 0 as the perception-filled now has advanced to E. The
line FF' represents a protention to be fulfilled in a coming
perception at F.
'
'E
' r
--~~----~~~----- -"r--
- -
I
I
'
it flow the oblique parallel memory and protention lines
which fix past events and future expectations into the
memory and expectation order of the present. The
present therefore contains a continuous and unperturbable time-order; the latter feature is schematically guaranteed by the parallelism of the oblique lines. EP' is the
present retentional memory of the temporal event-object
which occurred over PE. The triangle PEP' is the whole
melodic episode in its "double continuity": the horizontal
line represents the continuous flux of ever new perceptual
nows, while the broadening triangular surface composed
of parallel paths which fall out, as it were, from the flux,
stands for the continuous memory lines of past nows feed·
ing into the present memory.
The horizontal through P marks a variable threshold between retention and secondary memory, below which the
melody would have outlasted the retentional span of that
consciousness and would cease to be a unified temporal
object. When F is now, the melody will have to be deliberately or spontaneously recalled, being by then a secondary
memory at P.
Husserl's diagram differs from the schema I have drawn
for Augustine in that the horizontal axis of the former
stands for the internal temporal flux rather than for the
external motion of the world. Husser! regards that inner
flux as the fundamental temporal phenomenon; an external time-consciousness would be for him a contradiction
in terms, because to be conscious of a phenomenon tem-
porally is just to constitute the temporal flux in consciousness. Therefore Husserl uses one time coordinate to repre-
'
'
sent the simultaneous presence of all the phases of time in
consciousness and another to stand for the advancing tem\
poral flux whose front is the now-consciousness. But
\
\
I
\
I
whether this flux is really a primary phenomenon is just
the question. (See Sec. VI I.)
\;, P"
I
I
I
•
•
•
Aristotle's understanding of time as the number of motion counted by the soul follows from his theory of motion
The horizontal axis represents the originary flux of now
as actualization. Augustine's view of time as the dimen-
points in consciousness. E is the now. PE is the span of the
temporal flux of one temporally perceived object, for example, a melody, and it is therefore one retentional episode whose beginning was at P. 0 is some now before the
initial now of the melody and belongs to the time of an
event now past. F is a future now.
The oblique lines PP ', 00' represent the "shading off"
or "sinking away/} into memory of the consciousness of P
sionality of the soul follows from his desire to relate the
three phases of human temporality to the eternity of the
Creator. Kant's theory of time will serve to ground the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
new science of dynamics, particularly its causal relations.
Insofar as the temporal relations of nature are contributed
by a faculty of the soul, its formative sensibility, Kant is
Angustine's heir, but it will be more interesting to see his
theory in terms of an antithesis to Aristotle.
81
�IV. KANT: TIME AS INNER SENSE
1. INNER SENSE
The first and all-determining discovery Kant presents in
the Critique of Pure Reason is a truly revolutionary understanding of what it means to sense ("Transcendental Aesthetic"). Recall that Aristotle had said that time is sensed,
or better, perceived, in the primary sensory organ, because
whatever is sensible also has duration. Now Kant claims
that time is not sensed but is the form of sense. That means
that the sensibility is not only a receptive but also a formative faculty; and the first form it gives sensation is temporal form.
What is behind this claim? The immediate purpose of
the Critique is the grounding of the knowledge of nature,
above all of the new science of motion, Newtonian physics. "Grounding" means setting out the conditions of possibility of such a science, which guarantee its necessity and
its universality-which make it certain. Aristotelian physics was the science of individual motions by which an indeterminate material, which is only potentially, is formed
into an independent, fully actual, natural substance. Newtonian science, in stark contrast, studies the motion of a
system of bodies homogeneously constituted of massy
matter and moving inertially through space unless deflected by interactions with other masses, interactions
which are governed by universal mathematical laws of
force. For the former, time was the counting of the actualizing motion, for the latter it is the independent variable in
the expression of natural laws.
Kant assumes that knowledge of this system of nature
requires the cooperation of two faculties. One is active,
law-giving, spontaneous (which means that it originates
with the human subject itself); it is the thinking function,
and the faculty is called the understanding. The other is a
receptive power which must be affected by something
given to it from outside; it is the sensibility. The latter is
needed because human thinking is for Kant purely formal,
that is to say, it has a merely rule-supplying function.
Therefore it is incapable of conceiving its own objects of
thought without being supplied with matter; for it to try to
do so would be like a hand grasping its own grasp-less
than an empty form. Therefore, thinking requires that a
material be given to it, and the faculty in which such
givens are received as representations-since Kant con~
siders everything before consciousness at all a representation-is precisely the sensibility (B 33). Kant also calls this
receptive faculty the intuition, and he applies that same
term to the original pure content which he ascribes to it
and into which sensory affection is received.
Now all physical experience in fact occurs in terms of
space and time, and these are understood to be the primary dimensions of physics. Therefore, if it is to be a certain science, there must be neither absolute, independent,
82
external substances in space nor adventitious developments through time. For both of these could be known
only after the fact of experience, and that means they
could not be known necessarily or universally. The only
knowledge which can be certain is that which is conditioned from the beginning through the observer himselfwhich is, in Kant's term, a priori.
Therefore, not only the conceptual side of physics but
also the invariable components of its sensory aspect,
namely space and time, must proceed from the knower.
Accordingly Kant assigns to him an original formative receptivity-on the face of it a contradiction in terms, but an
unavoidable one. This actively receptive capacity is Janusfaced. One face is turned outward and shapes sense material into spatial configurations; the other looks inward and
forms what it receives into temporal sequences. The sensibility, then, is dual; it has an inner and an outer sense.
Kant presents the outer sense first, significantly, as it
turns out. This sense receives in the mode of outsideness,
in two meanings of the word. First it receives those sensations which are alien and adventitious, which come to us
as they will from outside ourselves. But then it also receives them in the mode of outsideness, of externality,
namely as spatially extensive. The outer sense is therefore
the reason why external sensations always assume spatial
form. Furthermore, because the spatial form has inherent
formative characteristics, namely those of Euclidean geometry, spatial appearances are certain to be amenable to
geometric treatment. Hence the outer sense guarantees
the applicability of mathematics to science.
The inner sense, on the other hand, faces toward the
innermost parts, the very subject or referrent of all representations, the Self. The inner sense receives the self as if
it too were a given, namely as it presents itself to its own
intuition. Within the inner sense the subject itself becomes, by definition, an appearance, for whatever the sensibility receives and forms is called an appearance. The inner sense is called time.Jt is not that time is an inner sense,
but that the inner sense, and the self appearing within it,
are temporal in character. In so presenting inner sense
Kant is therefore not saying what time is but only why it is
the inevitable form every appearance takes. Nevertheless,
a new understanding of the nature of time will come out of
Kant's discovery, one aspect of which has already
emerged: Contrary to Aristotle, for whom time is not an
affection of motion, Kant will argue that motion itself is
possible only under the form of inner sense. Indeed it is
only under the form of temporality that motion is even
conceivable for Kant, since it is only the succession of time
which fluidifies the law of contradiction so that opposite
predicates can, at different times, belong to the same object-that being the much reduced post-Aristotelian concept of motion (B 48).
But why is the inner sense given the name of time? And
what does it mean to say that the self appears within it?
The paradoxical fact that the self, the ultimate subject of
SUMMER 1983
�representations, is somehow also an appearance to itself is
taken as given, and, Kant says, is equally a mystery in all
theories (B 68, 152). But to learn how it'happens we go to
that part of the Critique which deals with thinking ("Tran·
scendental Deduction").
2. UNDERSTANDING
All conceiving is steadfastly accompanied by an "I
think," a kind of pervasive prefix to all thinking, which is,
however, purely formal in that it adds nothing to what I
think. Furthermore, the prefix tells me at most that I am
but never what I am (B 157). Kant calls this consciousness
"apperception," a term that had previously meant selfconsciousness. He, however, indicates by the term not
self-knowing but only the inmost subject or self of a rational being, the ultimate knower. The apperception is
"transendental," which in Kantian terminology means
that it is a faculty, not an object.
So Kant does not mean that the self is self-conscious in
the sense of having itself as an object; it is not, like Aristotle's pure intellect, thought thinking itself. Nor is the self
my self; indeed its self-hood is not in the ordinary sense
personal. The self might as well be an "it" (B 404), for it is
simply the hidden subject underlying all thinking functions. (Heidegger will criticize the lack of "my-ownness" in
the Kantian self.) Moreover, the transcendental subject
cannot be known to itself, because its strictly formal, that
is, rule-giving thinking functions cannot, by their very
character, become objects of thought to themselves (A
402).
Collectively these conceiving functions (the word "function" is taken statically, as in mathematics) are called the
understanding, which is therefore the self as it is diversified
into certain definite enumerable functions or 11 Categories.H
Each of these accomplishes certain syntheses or unifications proper to itself. Besides these operations the categories are nothing and mean nothing. What do they synthesize?
Sensible givenness is assumed to be in its very nature
manifold, spread out, various. Accordingly, the sensibility
must be capable of receiving such a manifold. In the case
of the outer sense there must be ready a transcendental
space for its reception. This sense therefore contains a
Objects represented in the sensibility and unified by the
understanding are called phenomena or appearances (A
429 ff.). Kant claims that when the pure content of inner
sense is determined by thinking, the resulting appearance
is that of the apperceiving subject itself. Kant takes the
word appearance seriously-only that which is not itself on
the scene can have appearances. So the self, which cannot
know itself in itself, appears in the inner sense, and since
every appearance is an appearance for the subject, the self
appears to itself. The primary example of self-appearance is
the act of attention, in which thinking, having determined
the inner sense according to laws of connection contained
in the categories, appears as a succession of moments
(B 155)-our ordinary awareness of the now-succession.
The transcendental self, then, the inaccessible rational
source of thinking, can determine another part of the soul,
and though it cannot know itself, it can at least represent
itself to itself as an appearance. Note, however, that the
situation is peculiar in that the self can hardly be said to
affect the sensibility as sensory material could affect it: it
cannot materially fill but only determine or unify the inner
sense.
The motive for establishing an inner sense is, on the
face of it, to ground the temporal or causal dimension of
physics, but its deeper role is that of providing for selfappearance. The reason why this sense, or rather its content, is identified with time now emerges. This content is
the steady, unceasing, underlying flow which we always
come to in self-inspection: "Time does not pass away but
in it passes the existence of what is changeable." Time itself is unchangeable and permanent (B 183), for it is the
original flux-content of the inner sense itself; it is this fluxcontent which our thinking determines and structures.
The thought-determined inner sense is consciousness,
but it is emphatically not self-consciousness in the sense of
self-knowledge, since the self has not affected the inner
self so as to produce the kind of real knowledge Kant calls
experience. For experience requires more than that the
subject should work on itself: it requires a material object
(where "material" refers not to physical matter but to a
real sensory content).
3. IMAGINATION
{(pure manifold," the pure intuition mentioned above,
which is the form-giving content affected by sensationthe pure space of geometry itself. The nature of this pure
content of inner sense will be addressed presently.
It is this pure content of the sensibility that is unified, or
determined, or structured by the understanding in definite ways, as many ways as there are concept·categories.
What the understanding determines first is the content
closest to it, so to speak, namely that of the inner sense.
That is how the thinking functions first obtain their required object, although a pure, not a sensory one.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The configurations to which thinking determines the
inner sense are the work of that most central power, "an
art hidden in the depth of the human soul" (B 181), the
imagination. For Aristotle, the activity of the imagination,
identical with that of the primary sensorium, is not hidden
in the depth at all; it is, in fact, on the interface of soul and
nature and has a physical base. Kant rightly considers his
discovery of the original contribution of the transcendental imagination quite new (A 120 n.). For him thinking and
sensing are too heterogeneous to come together without
83
�some intermediate agency; it is the imagination which is
the meeting ground of the two.
It performs what Kant calls a "figurative" synthesis (B
154), which produces schemata through which thinking
can determine sense and accomplish the mystery of
empty, meaningless thought interpenetrating with pure
inner flux. The schemata are essentially rules for sensual·
izing concepts or, equally, conceptualizing sense content.
The imagination makes time thinkable or, as we have
seen, conscious. But much more importantly, it does the
inverse: it makes thought temporal.
Here are just two examples of the schemata which are
the work of the imagination. (Oddly, and significantly, this
work is always presented as picture or figure-making, al·
though it is supposed to be primarily temporal.)
1. The inner flux, the pure intuition of time, is, as was
said, assumed to be an even, primary flow. (Recalling that
Kant's project is the grounding of Newtonian physics we
can recognize in this flux the internalization of Newton's
equably flowing absolute world time.) Kant calls it the pure
picture of quantity, applicable to all objects in general.
The first schema or conceptualization of this continuous
forward flow of inner quantity is number. Number is the
imaginative scheme of a countable succession of units,
that is, of articulated, measured internal duration. In
counting, the understanding is continually unifying the
undifferentiatedly fluid manifold of pure Time, and generating pure, conscious, temporal succession, or the pure
sense of passing: counting is not so different from the pulsing of mere consciousness itself. (The spatial analogue
to the difference between Time as flux and conceptdetermined time would be that between Space as a whole
and measured space.)
2. Another imaginative configuration brings together
pure inner intuition with the concept of necessary connection in the schema of before-and-aftu. Thus is added to
conscious advancing time a necessary, unperturbable
time-order, the ground, for Kant, of the principle of cause
and effect in nature.
All the schemata together-there are as many as the
understanding has concepts-circumscribe thoughtinformed temporal flux, or speaking more familiarly, temporal thinking. It was, after all, to be expected that when
the rational self cast itself into inner sense to become an
appearance the result should be thinking in time. What are
its features?
4. TIME AND SPACE
For Aristotle, the external world with its continuity of
places defined by movable substances is clearly prior to
being in time, which is merely the countable aspect of motion.
Kant, on the other hand, at first, at least, presents time
as the sense of senses, the first formal condition of all ap-
84
pearing objects in general, both self and nature. Time receives all representations, everything which is there for
consciousness at all; it is the ultimate relating receptacle
and the condition of all connectedness. Space, on the
other hand, is the condition of outer appearance, namely
of nature, only (A 99, B 177). The reason is that time belongs immediately to the soul and is the place of consciousness itself, while space must wait to receive material from
the outside.
But then, in a crucial section added to the second edition of the Critique, the "Refutation of Idealism" (B 274279), Kant totally inverts his new order in a doctrine surprising in the context but also quite unavoidable. Space is
again the condition of temporal experience.
In the "Refutation" Kant explicitly aims to prove that
mere consciousness of one's own existence-thoughtdetermined inner sense-proves, in being affected by
outer sense, the real existence of external objects in space.
Implicitly, however, he shows that objects in space are the
necessary condition of self-experience.
The internal flux of unfocussed attention, he argues, is
absolutely featureless, indeterminate, a mere fugitiveness.
To determine time and give it steadiness it must he projected on something permanent; it must be represented in
terms of perceived permanence in space. Spatial appearances seem to stay put while time has no aspect that
stands but its flux itself. Time supports only the alteration
of determinations, but no determinate steady object; in
the soul "everything is in continual flux" (A 381). Therefore the representation of time is always spatial; if time is
to appear at all it must be in a spatial form, most appropriately as a one-dimensional straight line (B 156): Time appears as space reduced by two dimensions. It is now also
clear why the self cannot really properly appear in time.
The inner intuition admits no material affection except
through space. (Indeed, it is only this geometrization of appearing time which makes possible the primary measurement of physical motion, namely velocity. For velocity is
conceivable only as a ratio of homogeneous magnitudes,
namely space lengths and time lengths. But as I said, that
means that time, insofar as it is apprehensible at all, which
is to say, insofar as it is representable, is only a dimension
abstracted from space: Bergson has a point when he accuses Kant of confusing time with space (Essay, "Conclu.
SIOn ") .
Yet more follows: There can be no full consciousness
without the appearances of three-dimensional externality.
For the linear representation of the determinate inner
sense, while it may be formally adequate, is also utterly
poverty-stricken and unrevealing (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Nature, Preface). To appear to itself, the self
must put the inner sense in the way of spatial appearances
which then represent to it its own formative powers and
that of its sensibility. The system of such revealing
thought-informed spatia-temporal appearances Kant calls
nature and its science is Newtonian physics.
SUMMER 1983
�Inner experience is, then, only mediately possible
through space. That is why, I think, space is treated before
time in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and why the imag·
ination is fundamentally figurative. Time began as the formal (or better, formative) condition of all appearance what·
soever, but space turns out to be the condition of the
appearance of time. A self having only an inner sense
would have no representations of itself at all. If it were conscious it would be conscious of nothing; it would be at
most a forever-idle capability of a possible experience.
5. TEMPORAL THINKING
To recapitulate: I. Self-consciousness: Of the self which
underlies all thinking and sensing there is no knowledge.
There is no immediate representation of it; it cannot become an object to itself beyond the indication given in the
universal prefix "I think." There is therefore no selfconsciousness in the sense of reflective self-knowledge. (It
is one of the mysteries of the Critique how any of the reflective terms necessary to critical analysis of the self obtain their meaning.) 2. Consciousness: Consciousness,
awareness, belongs to the thought-determined inner
sense, or better, is identical with it. That time is in the soul
and that the soul is in time are converse propositions (A
362). Both claims mean that the self is ready and able to
receive an external material. But to be merely aware in this
way is no more to know oneself than it is actually to experience an external object. Time, even when determined by
thought, yields no formed object but merely the schemata
of relations of possible representations within the soul (B
50). It is the mere capacity for thinking objects. 3. Selfexperience: If self-knowledge in the reflective sense is impossible to the self, it can yet experience itself, that is, its
own powers, in inner sense~ but only if that sense is spatially represented and determined by real objects. Then
the self can appear to itself as a temporally thinking subject and behold its formative faculties constituting nature.
Self-experience begins 23 when temporal thinking, namely
the time-informed categories, such as number, permanence, and causality, is exercised on spatial material.
A great question arises. The explicit motive of the Critique was to find what the human constitution must be if
physics is to be a science. From this point of view the temporal sense was established primarily to secure the causal
ordering of motion. But is it plausible that Kant's view of
the soul should be so altogether a mere consequence of
this motive? Indeed, there might well be other ways to
ground physical causality than by means of the original
flux which, as has been shown, is in itself insufficient to
account for self-conscious thought24 A deeper reason,
namely Kant's thinking about thought itself, seems to me
to be at work. It is best phrased in terms of the consequences following from his very modern rejection of Aristotle.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
For Aristotle knowing is a motion of the soul, an actualization, which achieves actuality as the intellect achieves
its end and becomes the thing thought. That final activity
is true life. For Kant, knowing, as the conceiving of material objects, cannot be such a motion, since motion is itself
generated by thinking, when it determines space through
time (B 155, note). Nor can it be an activity, for thought is
not fulfilled in its object: It simply determines or unifies
the manifold and, so to speak, fits itself about the object
and constitutes it. Truth is no longer the simple luminous
identity of the intellect with its intelligible object, but
rather the "adequation" of thought with the material object (B 82). 25 Therefore Kant's thinking has neither motion
nor life; it has no actuating principle.
The pure flux of inner sense can now be seen in the
light of a deep though inexplicit need. Time is needed to
float thought, as it were. It gives thinking a spurious kind of
motion, a pseudo-activity. In themselves the thinking
functions are merely empty, static forms; cast on the
stream of inner sense they assume fluidity. Time is the animating principle of that kind of thinking which has no end
in itself, and the Kantian temporality is the substitute for
the lost life of thought.
*
*
*
Kant's treatment of time is the focus of Heidegger' s
deep, engaged, but also strained reading of the first Critique. Heidegger calls this kind of interpretative reading a
"recovery" or "repetition" (Wiederholung). It is meant to
bring to light the unspoken, and for the author unspeakable, implications of the text. It attempts to reveal not
what the author meant and failed to say-an author worth
"repeating" is quite able to express himself-but rather
the inexorable ultimate outcome implicit in his thought.
This interpretation yields very striking-if not quite persuasive-results especially with respect to an aspect of
time markedly missing from Kant's account, namely its
three phases. Heidegger reconstructs these from the first,
superseded version of the Transcendental Deduction.
(See Note 26 for a summary of Kant's text with reference
to Heidegger's interpretation.)
I have just argued that Kant has deep reasons for making time the primary sense, namely to vivify the inert functions of his concepts, but that his almost inadvertent, yet
inescapable tendency is the spatialization of time. However, Heidegger, who sees in Kant his predecessor, views
the whole critical enterprise as centered on the unexpressed fundamental temporality of the human being.
Heidegger understands that hidden art of the imagination,
to which Kant assigns the function of temporalizing thinking (or, equivalently, of thought-determining time) as the
"temporalizing," the time-origination which is the being
of human existence. Kant drew back, as it were, from an
opportunity he was not ready for, the possibility of seeing
the imagination not as a third and mediating faculty, the
85
�meeting ground of thought and sense, but as the common
root of both. He could not yet abstract from its figurative
character to see it as transcendental temporality simply.
Kant's failure to explain the "my-ownness" of the self, together with his inability to see the imagination, the meeting ground of self and time, as anything but a mystery are
Heidegger's clues to a new understanding of human existence.
Heidegger owes debts also to Hegel and Bergson (see
Note 27), and most certainly to Augustine (paras. 9, 81
end), who anticipates him in the essential temporality of
the human being and in the primacy of the future among
the time phases-indeed one might almost call Heidegger
a godless Augustine. But he goes beyond all of them, as far
as one can go, I think, in the exaltation of time. If for Kant
the inner sense is a mysterious mirror for the unknowable
self, for Heidegger time will be the very meaning of being
human. The answer to the question "What is time?'' will
fall out of the analysis of human existence.
Care has a threefold constitution: 1. The being that
cares, understands. Understanding-sharply distinguished
from theoretical knowing-is its ability to project before
itself its own possibilities. It is aware of being able to be
(not that it has that possibility but that it is that possibility).
The being that exists is always "ahead of itself." For what
it is, its essence, is just that it exists, that it understands
itself as a being that is able to be.
2. This being, Dasein, also has moods, "existential
moods," which are the ground of ordinary, familiar moodiness. These moods are testimony to the condition in
which it already finds itself (Befindlichkeit). They attest to
its "facticity," to the bald fact that it always finds itself already cast or thrown into an alien world. Heidegger calls
the existential condition of existing always already in the
world, uthrownness."
3. In this world Dasein is always already preoccupied
with what it finds there, alongside itself, namely other existences and things. It is its lot to sink into a state of selfforgetfulness or "fallenness" as it busily "takes care" of
this world. This state of "inauthenticity," literally: "unone's-ownness," is as genuine a possibility of existence as
V. HElD EGGER: TEMPORALITY AS THE MEANING
OF EXISTENCE
1. ECSTATIC TEMPORALITY
Heidegger's starting point in Being and Time is the old
question concerning Being. However, he does not ask:
What is Being?, since he considers that question a fateful
wrong turn into metaphysics. He rather asks: What is the
meaning of being?, What makes a being possible?, What is
the being (Sein) of Being (Seiendes)? Assuming that there
are different beings, he chooses to pursue the question by
analyzing the being most expressive of the inquiry itself,
the being that exists. To exist means to position oneself
beyond oneself so as to understand one's own being. The
being that so exists is also the being that is there, that finds
itself involved in the world, not merely present in it. It is,
further, that being which is in each case mine, which has
"each·his·ownness," in contrast to the unowned Kantian
subject. Heidegger names it by the ordinary German
term for existence, Dasein, uthere·being." It is the human
being.
The larger first part of the book is devoted to an "existential analysis," an interpretative description of the phenomena of existence which will reveal its basic structure.
These original modes are called "existentials," and the
structure so revealed is called "care." The
~~meaning"
of
care, that is to say, that which makes it possible, will be
temporality.
In the following abbreviated account of "care," the prodigious originality and ingeniousness of Heidegger's analysis will perforce be blunted.
86
its opposite, authenticity; Heidegger disclaims any invidious connotation in these terms.
In sum, then, the being that cares is a being ahead of
itself in projecting its own possibilities, which finds itself
involved in a world along with other existences and entities, and which can lose itself in being busy about them.
Now Heidegger asks what it means for Daesin to be in
this way. This question belongs to a deeper, that is, an ontological, level of analysis, for here is discovered the meaning of care, namely the condition of its possibility. The answer is: temporality (Second Part, Chps. 3-6).
The existent being is one about whom there is always
something yet outstanding, something still to come, namely
its death. So also is it an "ecstatic" being. ~~Ecstatic" is a word
used by Aristotle in his chapters on time (Phys. 222 b 17) to
describe the self-unsettling of motion. Heidegger uses if for
the primordial "being out of itself" of Dasein, namely its
temporality (par. 65). 28 The word has, of course, the connotation of being transported and rapt away.
Dasein is "out of itself" in three ecstatic phases, each of
which accounts primarily but not exclusively for one of
the aspects of care in either its inauthentic or its authentic
version. Hence the ontological analysis covers a large number of combinations, of which I shall sketch only the primary ones, reversing Heidegger's order so as to begin with
the ecstasis to which Heidegger assigns the least standing
(par. 68).
1. The self-forgetfulness of fallenness is in its nature always inauthentic. It is the mode of-note well-actuality,
of fact, of mere presentness and nowness, greedy for satisfactions which hold no further possibilities. The ontological ground of this existential mode is the ectasis of the
present.
Heidegger understands the present not in the tradiSUMMER 1983
�tiona! way as the phase of perceptual vividness, but as a
derivative mode, abstracted from living involvement-the
mode of "presentification," the grasping attempt to turn
the possibilities of existence into present actualities. The
ecstasis which yields the present, the phase which is traditionally the front or fulcrum of time, is the one most
dependent on the other phases for its authentic version
(68 c).
2. Just as in English there is a periphrastic past perfect
"I am gone," so in German one says ul am having been"
(Ich bin gewesen). Human existence always is as having
been, for it always finds itself already cast into the alien
world. It is this fact which makes it moody. An existential
mood is a condition in which Dasein finds itself coming
back to or brought before the mere fact of its own existence.29 Heidegger gives as a cardinal example the authentic mood which he calls dread or anxiety (Angst; the inauthentic counterpart is ordinary fear). In anxiety Dasein
discovers the world into which it has been thrown as uncanny, unhomy, unmeaning, unamenable to being taken
care of. Anxiety brings Dasein back to the fact of its own
isolated thrownness, and this "being brought back to itself" apprises it that it can return to itself; that it has the
possibility of "recovering" or "repeating" itself. What ac-
counts for the possibility human existence has of finding
itself already in a state of mind or mood and what brings it
face to face with its own recoverableness (Wiederholbarkeit; sometimes translated "repeatability") is the ecstasis of
the past, in which Dasein goes out of itself to be as having
been (68 b). Through this ecstasis human existence comes
back to itself as an ever-antecedent fact whose possibilities
can always be repeated. Therewith is also revealed the possibility of authentic existence. It demands the introduction of a future element into the repetition of its past.
3. Therefore the primary ecstasis of primordial authentic temporality is the future (65). This future is not an indeterminate "not yet." It is, as the German Zu-kunft suggests to Heidegger, that toward which Dasein goes, but it
is also the terminus from which Dasein comes back into
the situation in which it finds itself, to face the present
resolutely. The future thus comprehends and makes possible the other two ecstases. Futurity accounts for the aspect of care called understanding, since to understand
means to project one's own possibilities. Future means anticipation; rather than being propelled by present urgencies that need to be taken care of, futural Dasein cares authentically: It lets its own possibilities for being come
toward itself. The future, too, enables the human being to
repossess its past properly; it is in facing its possibilities
that Dasein is brought back to what it already was. The
futural ecstasis of coming toward oneself accounts for authentic existence (69 a).
The dominant case of authentic futurity, understood as
resolute anticipation, is Dasein's facing of its own death
(46-63). The human being is that being which lives as a
being which is going to die. Dasein discovers among its exTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
istential possibilities the ultimate one of not being, and
this discovery makes it focus on the wholeness of its existence. Death is what it escapes from in the inauthentic
present; death is what it is already inescapably saddled
with; death is what it resolutely anticipates. Death therefore has the threefold structure exhibited by care and
time, and conversely. The inference follows that our temporality is finite and that primordial existential time comes
to an end.
What then of ordinary time, the common time human
beings have, spend, puzzle about? Heidegger undertakes
to show that, strange though it seems, time is temporal,
namely that ordinary time falls out of primordial temporality (79-82).
Dasein finds itself in the world, and it is in dealing with
its "gear" or "equipment" (Zeug), in circumspectly taking
care of its affairs, that ordinary time shows itself. Affairs in
the world can be dated: uLater, when . .. " or "now,
that. .. " or "formerly, when ... "-that is the language of
worldly management. This datability of the world is derived from ecstatic temporality because "later, when" can
be said only on the condition that there is possibility,
"now, that" only if there is presentification, and "formerly, when" only if there is repeatability. So Heidegger
has grounded anticipation, presence, and memory-for that
is what he is talking about-in the primordial temporality
which is human existence.
Precise public datability must refer to universal occurrences, originally to the sun's rising and setting. People
say, for instance, "now, that" the sun has set it is time to
turn in. This public reference enables people to make and
set clocks, and thence "vulgar," worldly time comes to be
what the clock tells. What the clock shows is a perfectly
levelled and indifferent equable succession of jerks called
nows, going forward from what is no longer to what is not
yet, and spawning many puzzles. Such time passes rather
than arises; the very use of clocks is witness to the attempt
to hold on to the not-yets and the no-longers by making
them all in turn present, as the clock's hands are followed
while they tick off the nows. What is worst of all for
Heidegger is that this meaningless derivative clock time is
theoretically infinite: It is the time of fallen, inauthentic
humanity because it masks the radical finitude of mortal
human existence. 30
2. DIFFICULTIES
Here is the extreme of opposition to Aristotle. Actuality,
fulfilled presence, is interpreted as human fallenness. Possibility, a notion even less determinate than potentiality
(which is always a specific "potentiality for") is raised to
being human existence itself. Time, which was for Aristotle merely the measurable aspect of a being's actualization, is for Heidegger the very meaning of existence. And,
87
�finally, time ends in actuality for Aristotle, but for Heidegger, in death.
Being and Time, in its potent and coherent originality
(though originality in the pursuit of being may well be a
disability) deserves at least the tribute of not being treated
like a lending library of terms and notions; one must enter
its world or stay out-the latter I think. The reasons are
sketched below.
I. The first is a mere intimation of a possible argument:
That actualizing motion has temporal duration which is
measurable by the soul, or that time is a dimension of the
created mind, or that the lawful causality of nature has a.
ground in the observer's temporality-these theories of
Aristotle, Augustine, and Kant respectively can be apprehended and judged directly, although their context illuminates their motive. It is otherwise with Heidegger's understanding of time, which is more inextricably and originally
implicated in his approaches: in the problematic formulation of the question concerning the "meaning of being,"
in the doubtful insistence that the human being is the being of choice for such an inquiry, in the interpretation of
human being as existence, in its analysis in terms of care,
and in the grounding of care in temporality. The doubts
one might have about any of these elements or about their
concatenation would make questionable the notion of a
primordial ecstatic temporality.
2. The interpretation of human existence as the being
which is its possibilities leads to its essential futurity, the
ecstasis which accounts for living in possibility. Dasein's
ultimate possibility is that of being able not to be: it is
death (50), the extreme possibility. In requiring of the human being that it face at every moment this end as its own,
Heidegger deprecates-I am disregarding the pretense
that these are not terms of judgement-as inauthentic and
fallen the perennial wisdom of humankind that the dread
of death must not dominate life. The question arises
whether the stark and unspecific resolution to face one's
own death can at all be the basis of public decency and
even inner dignity. I shall argue that the future is of the
three phases the most impotent for human action and that
our death should be allowed to exert its power only as a
remote and indefinite limit of life.
3. The greatest problem and the one with most bearing
on the final section of my inquiry has to do with Heidegger's treatment of the past Human existence has a certain
self-antecedence which is grounded in the ecstases of "being as having been." The defining characteristic of this
mode is that it brings Dasein back to the "repetition" of its
own possibilities and to authentic being. This ecstasis naturally plays the chief role in the constitution of "historicality" -although the most fundamental role is still played by
the future. For true historicality ultimately arises from a
repetition of the past which is motivated by the resolute
projection of a life span dominated by "being-unto-death."
Dasein can explicitly repeat possibilities of existence
that have been handed down. Such repeating "is explicit
88
tradition, that is to say, the going back into a Dasein that
has been there." Authentic repetition means that "Dasein
chooses for itself its hero" on the basis of an anticipatory
resolution. What Dasein thus recovers is a possibility, not a
state (74).
Dasein takes over such possibilities as its heritage. How?
Heidegger begins his analysis of the historical past with a
discussion of real antiquities, the objects of archaeology.
These are things which were once "to hand," by which
Heidegger means functional, in a world that is gone. They
are now present in our world. They are not genuinely but
only secondarily historical because insofar as they are
"equipment" they are not in the past but in this world. As
the being of their own world was wholly conditional on
that of a past Dasein, so its passing is wholly a matter of
human temporality.
Now here is the difficulty: If Dasein is to recover its heritage, the possibilities of an existence that has been, it must
do so by way of the surviving "equipment" of the past,
through ruins, pots and manuscripts. Heidegger suggests
no other way (73).
But how does it recognize these as testimony of antecedent existence? The ecstasis of the past was formulated
in terms of the indivual, unique, and separate being. What
can it mean to recognize in the stuff "to hand" in the
present world the possibilities of other, past existences,
not to speak of making them one's own?
The problem points to what seems to me a crucial lacuna in Heidegger's account of the past The ecstasis may
be the necessary condition of ordinary temporality but it
does not seem to be a sufficient condition. The "ontic"
consequences, namely human beings with their past, do
not immediately fall out of the "ontological" ground of
past being. To lay down that Dasein must have a past because it is in its being temporalizing does not tell how the
individual human being comes back to itself, that is, remembers. And yet, the additional element that is needed
to complete the account, namely what is ordinarily called
memory, may change the whole complexion of the account.
Since Heidegger considers existence to be possibility he
cannot ascribe a nature or faculties to human beings. Indeed, in his "recovery" of Kant he had suppressed the figurative, primarily spatial, imagination, Kant's faculty for
having objects without their presence. But how is the reconstruction or recovery of one's own possibilities, or of
the possibilities of the past world of historical remains, to
take place without such a faculty for reconstituting remembrance of the past, personal, or historical?
One final point: Repetition, the authentic appropriation
of past possibilities, seems to be most practicable for written works, records of past thought The mode of resolute
purpose, however, in which such a recovery is to be carried
on seems to invite a certain wilfulness of interpretation
which leads to highly pointed constructive readings. Such
repetition may be incomparably more serious than a hisSUMMER 1983
�toricistic approach, but it is also very constricted, since, being grounded in the stark mood of the past ecstasis, it excludes less harsh modes of pastness. In particular, there is
no authentic mode of panoramic revery or imaginative
contemplation, 31 though these, I shall argue, are of primary importance in human temporality.
*
*
•
So I now come to some reflections of my own about
time. Naturally, I shall draw on the philosophers just studied for the terms of the inquiry, for insight into the contexts implied in certain answers, and for examples of what
seem to me fertile errors. Since I shall argue that time has
no being and that to think otherwise has harmful consequences, I should not attempt to present a theory of what
time is, but rather an intimation of what it is that induces
the illusion of temporal being. And, of course, I should explain why, for all that, I think of the past as the prime
phase of time.
try to capture its being, though time-terms there are
aplenty. For, I claim, time as a distinct object of inquiry, or
rather our sense of its being one, comes about when we
block our usual mental activity and try to concentrate on
time itself:
Die Ziet
Es gibt ein sehr probates Mittel,
die Zeit zu halten am Schlawittel:
Man nimmt die Taschenuhr zur Hand
und folgt dem Zeiger unverwandt.
Sie geht so Iangsam dann, so brav
als wie ein wohlgezogen Schaf,
setzt Fuss vor Fuss so voll Manier
als wie ein Fraulein von Saint-Cyr.
Jedoch vertraumst du dich ein Weilchen,
so ri.ickt das ziichtigliche Veilchen
mit Beinen wie der Vogel Strauss
und heimlich wie ein Puma aus.
VI. TIME AND THE IMAGINATION
Und wieder siehst du auf sie nieder;
ha, Elende!-Doch was ist das?
!. THE NON-BEING OF TIME
The beloved text of writers on time is Augustine, Confessions, XI 14:
For what is time? Who is able easily and briefly to explain
that? Who is able so much in thought to comprehend it as to
bring forth something in words? Although what do we more
familiarly and knowingly mention in speaking than time? And
we understand surely when we speak of it; we also understand
when we hear someone else speaking of it. What then is time?
If no one asks it of me, I know; if I want to explain it to the
one that is asking, I do not know.
At first thought, Augustine's observation seems to be no
more true of time than of any other matter: Questioning
always makes the familiar strange and precipitates perplexity. Yet there is this difference: Though we sometimes
quarrel about the management and the worth of time, we
deal with its ubiquitous appearances not only with perfect,
practical aplomb but also without anxiety to defend a doctrine concerning its being. I think that is because we have
an intimation that our dealing with temporal affairs and
our speaking in temporal terms has, as it were, nothing to
it, no object of inquiry whose name is time. We sense that
the bold question "What is Time?'' itself drives the answer
implied in our unimpeded behavior out of sight.
But from another aspect, what Augustine says seems
not quite right. We really do not know what time is when
we are not asked; we only know how to live familiarly with
watches and words and our sense of time. And therefore
we do not know it less when we ask ourselves about it. On
the contrary, there is not even any Time to know until we
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Unschuldig Iachelnd macht sie wieder
die zierlichsten Sekunden-Pas.
Christian Morgenstern, Zeitgedichte
Time
There is a good and proven way
To strongarm Time and make it stay.
just take your wrist-watch by the band
And concentrate upon her hand.
Then she goes slow enough to keep
The pace, as of a well bred sheepGoes step by step, as mannerly
As any high-bred miss could be.
But if you daydream for a while
The shrinking violet with guile
Makes off on legs of ostrich length
And with a puma's stealthy strength.
Now you look down just as beforecurious chance!
With guiless smile she steps once more
The very daintiest second-dlmce.
a wretched watch! 0
E. B.
What we find when we concentrate on the passage of
time is the repeatedly frustrated impulse of our intention to perceive time, indeed an iteration of attempts,
orchestrated by the beating of our hearts and the
coursing of our blood-a kind of internal perception
89
�called by psychologists prioperception, self-perception.
As soon as we leave off trying to find in ourselves
empty time we see images of spatial passage. Indeed
even Kant finally admits that inner sense, to be actually
affected, needs spatial appearance. The pure underlying
flux seems to me, therefore, a philosophical construction which is the result of ulterior motives, and a phenomenon which is the effect of self-interference. So
when Husser! claims such a flux for the first phenomenon of time-consciousness he is observing accuratelyhis own observing. Internal time flux is the first effect
of attempting a phenomenology of time-consciousness.
What of external time? Newton is alone in positing a
genuine external time flux, absolute, equable time antecedent to all motion, physical, yet not apparent~a notion whose motives are as understandable as the concept is confusing. All the others who appear to believe
in physical time turn out always to mean either some
designated physical process or the "passage of nature"
as a whole. 32 It seems to be impossible for them to
point to time itself or to refer to it except by spatial
metaphors.
From the physical point of view, time appears with
as many natures as there are motions and ways of
studying them: It is a discrete quantity for quantized
micro-motions, a covariant of space for remote places,
an anisotropic progress for irreversible processes, an independent continuum for the local motions of bodies,
and a numerable dimension for motions which are developments. I do not think it is possible to decide
which of these conceptions should primarily determine
our understanding of motion and thus time. It may just
be impossible to give a single account of physical time,
and therefore it may be best to say that various kinds
of time seem to occur in the world, depending on
where our attention is fixed, whether on the statistical
conceptions of aggregates, or on signaling to remote
clocks, or on watching the formation of completed beings,
or on the comprehension of human affairs.
This last perspective raises yet another possibility.
What if time were worldly but not of the world, not
one of its physical dimensions, but rather the very life
and moving principle of the world? Such a doctrine
makes the appearances coherent, as the monolithic
grandeur of Hegel's System shows, but so thoroughly
coherent as to put an end to human freedom understood as our possibility of thinking and choosing independently of our situation in time. It seems to me pernicious.
The claim is that the appearances of nature as well
as of human thought and action are manifestations of
the substance of Time. Now the chief property of appearances is usually thought to be that they are a becoming: variable in themselves, perspectival for us, in
alterable passage, contingent. If, then, the being behind
them and expressed in them is itself a primordial be-
90
coming such as Time must be, the variability of appearances must be governed by that deeper becoming,
T1me; appearance is the manifestation of the logic of
becoming. But that means that we must give up the
thought of a loose connection, of room for play between the world and its grounds, which supports our efforts at independent thought and free action, and submit to our time-determined fate. Human beings and
nations must fulfill the historical role assigned by their
time or be consigned to parochial impotence. Time is a
tyrant, and the philosophy of time is a tool for tyrants:
our time has seen the consequences.
These, in sum, then, are the charges against Time:
As an internal flux it is a philosophical or psychological
illusion, as an external elapsing it is no more than the
measure of motion, and as the fated logic of becoming
it is a coercive myth.
Aristotle, who first wrote a sustained exposition of
time, also introduced its most radical de-substantialization, more complete even than that of the later great
relativist of time, Leibniz, for whom time is at least an
idea in the mind of God (Note 4). In that dethronement of time, in the claim that time is only the
counted measure of motion, it seems to me that Aristotle was simply right. But why, we must ask ourselves, if
there is time neither within nor without, it is so copious a topic of talk, and whence comes our ever-fertile
feeling about time?
The related words time, tide, and German Zeit, appear not to be specifically temporal in their etymological
origin. They are connected with Greek daiomai, "I
divide or distribute," which has to do with all sorts of
divisions, like that of the people, demos, and the portioned meal, dais. Originally "time" seems to refer
quite neutrally to the dividing of certain passages of nature into stretches, just as Aristotle says. The timefigures of poetry and ordinary speech, on the other
hand, are usually strongly affective. Let me take as examples two complexes of time figures which seem to
me best to reveal why we speak of time with feeling.
First, phrases like "the womb of time," "the ripeness
of time," "the fullness of time." The Greeks have a
word, kair6s, which although sometimes used interchangeably with chr6nos, has the specific meaning of a
special, critical, or opportune moment.3 3 There was a
famous statue by Lysippus, showing Kairos with a long
lock over his brow and the back of his head shaved, as
a figure for the fact that foresight is needed to seize
opportunity by the forelock and that once gone it cannot be pulled back. In the New Testament the word has
assumed great theological gravity; it means both the individual time for turning or doing the appointed deed,
and the day of judgement: "The kairos is near," the fulness of time is at hand, John says in the opening of his
Revelation (1,3). Leaving aside theological elaborations,
what do such phrases betoken? They seem to me a!-
SUMMER 1983
�ways to mean at bottom this: We feel that there is
something in the world's becoming ,which peculiarly
concerns us, that something is in the offing, something
to monitor, to watch, to prepare for.
The second example is quite opposite in flavor,
namely, the image of time as a tread-mill or a conveyorbelt on which we plod or are wafted willy-nilly past
scheduled events and holidays to an unscheduled but
sure cessation. For terrestrial beings this coursing of
time has what biologists call a "circadian" rhythm, the
natural twenty-four hour periodicity of the sun's circuit,
imaged on the faces of our watches and iterated by the
predesigned routines of our business lives. It is the pathos of the daily round-no matter whether it whirrs or
grinds-that makes us time-conscious, conscious, that
is, of a fleeting stillness in the countable accretion of
our accomplished motions, of a flux that stays while it
flows, since it ever bears the same event. Were our
lives either totally mutable or totally monotonous we
would, I imagine, attain neither to a sense of time nor
to intimations of timelessness. The tread-mill figure of
time, at any rate, expresses the mood in which the passage of life seems at once inexorable and aimless, fugitive
and onerous.
Time, these figures show, is our word-and this is
the meaning elaborated by Heidegger-for the world's
passages insofar as we care. We speak of time often, because the world continually concerns us; we speak of it
variously, because our mood or concern shifts; and we
speak of it always in figures because there is no other
way to give shape to our sense of the world.
2. TIME AS NOTICED PASSAGE
Time, I say, is noticed passage-besides that it has no
being of its own. Perhaps I might have said that time is our
noticing of passage, but it seems to me better to locate our
sense of time where we feel it, in the changing world itself.
But what is this "passage"? When we speak of the passage of time we cannot mean (although we say) that time
passes, but rather that something, something primarily
spatial, is going on. Indeed, passage is not, to begin with, a
temporal word. It means a passing, a going from here to
11
there, as in pacing"; there even seems to be an etymological connection to "space." It has a meaning similar to, but
even wider than, Aristotle's "change," kinesis, which is it-
self a wider term than locomotion, while preserving its spatial undertone. I am using the term to express my understanding that appearances in their variability, however
caused and however regulated, are as appearances spatial.
Two views of motion seem to me paramount: Aristotelian motion, which is the actualization of the thing moved,
and Newtonian motion, which is characterized by the
time rate of change of a body with respect to space. For
Aristotle the individual mobile is everything-the substrate
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
which undergoes the motion and the substance which is
the aim and completion of the motion. For Newton the
mobile is qualitatively indifferent to the motion it undergoes, though as a mass it figures at once as the cause of
change in other bodies and as the cause of resistence to
change in itself. Thus for both motion is dynamic, that is,
it is regarded in terms of an indwelling cause: form for
Aristotle, force for Newton.
But consider that there are, to human discernment, apparently aimless motions which, like motes in sunlight,
show some pattern only in the aggregate, and also that it is
possible to regard bodies as moving not because of their
own inertia or gravity but by reason of their location in a
force field. In some of its appearances, motion is neither
compellingly Aristotelian or Newtonian. So as a kind of exercise, let me try a wider view of passage and of time, a
view less focussed on mobile and cause and more on field
and configuration, a spatial view.
By space I here mean not the abstracted infinite continuum of geometry but our extended human environment,
ground and figures equally. I think of it as just that which
is such as to be capable of being passed through and of
containing passages. But even before it is the scene of passages, it is the opening, the room for appearances, the
place for patency, what Keats calls "the World or Elemental Space." The Greek word for the appearances, phenomena, means what shines out, and the appearances seem to
me to have these four connected characteristics: They
shine out, they spread out, they vary and they are for us.
Patency, extendedness, multifariousness, and perceptibility-that is what makes space. The spatial scene is in its
very nature variable, and variable in the nth degree. Its
spread-out, variegated conformations themselves vary
variably or differentially-and those are the passages of
space. Some passages are lawfully developing fulfillments,
some negotiations of distance, some random dancesthese are the varieties of the variation of spatial variableness. It is not becoming that causes this display but just its
remaining what it is-various; and our discerning and noticing only make it more so.
We commonly think of the present configuration of
space as being an aggregate result, the outcome of many
separate paths of becoming. The world is full of forms
which seem explicable by their genesis. Space and its figures, appearing space, seems to be the frontal face of becoming, the advancing surface, so to speak, of the temporal succession.
But now let us cut the world in another way, as it were,
across the line of advance rather than lengthwise along
the lines of its genesis. Then the passage of time no longer
appears responsible for the configuration of space nor is its
history what makes the world appear, but space with its
present and passing appearances lies fully there and
openly displayed before us, in all its immediacy, a panorama which is not the result but the scene of time. I mean
that the appearances are not apprehended as the current
91
�state of temporal becoming, but the reverse-that the
world appears as a space, a room, a theatre of events and
happenings. These goings-on may be recurrent or continuous or periodically culminating, fascinatingly lawful or astoundingly unique. But the study of these passages tells us
only the route, not the reason for the panorama of appearances and directs us only to its elements and not to its integral sum. Let the contemplation of the world in this mode
(which is analogous to the field notions of physics) be, to
begin with, an exercise of the imagination in concentrat-
ing on the phenomenology of spatial passage.
Accordingly I describe motion-passage now more particularly as discerned variation. I do not figure such motion to
myself as being borne forward by time. By "being borne
forward by time" I mean the sense we allow ourselves to
entertain that each and all motions ride on some primary
vehicle (describable, to be sure, only by spatial metaphors
such as the flow of a river) which, when related to space by
a ratio, yields their rate of change or velocity, for example
55 miles per hour. In such a rate we normally take time as
the independent variable, precisely because we think of it
as the steady ubiquitous reference-spatial location varies
in three dimensions and two directions, while time only
advances. But to the time-disencumbered eye, motion is
not through space in time, but time, no longer equably universal, arises in different places and tempos as this or that
passage is noticed: felt in the observer or referred to other
motions, for instance to that of our natural clock, the sun.
A passage can be noticed by us, in the sense that we care
about it, when a distinguishable variation has been discerned within the variegated field of appearance. Such discerned variation, or perhaps better, differential variation,
of course always requires that the observer be himself in
the picture, 34 an appearance among appearances. Consequently certain kinds of passage arise from the relation of
the observer himself to the appearances. For example, he
can stay still and concentratedly look into the field, search
it by scanning, or himself bodily pass through it to obtain
varying perspectives. So, for example, little children sometimes gaze into the world pressed up against their grownup and sometimes run out to circulate and inspect.
The world, on its side, also offers to observation various
configurations of motion: There are distinct and isolated
motions that occur against a still background: runners running along a ridge. There is the scene which vibrates
everywhere with localized variation: the town-square on
market day. And then is the still center of an indifferently
varying field: the cynosure of one's eye in a crowded room.
We are moving or still figures in a still or moving landscape of appearance, and all passages can be distinguished
in terms of the various combinations between the discerning viewer and the passing scene, and, if we wish, timed by
means of some designated accompanying motion.
This primarily spatial way seems to me a particularly apt
way to come upon the world. To begin with, there is the
evidence of a common experience, namely that temporally
92
extended acquaintance dims vision, while sudden, panoramic sights make for poignant perception.
Then there is the unfailing testimony of our spatial
time-language. A ~~moment" of time is really a ''movement," as of the clock; the "passing" of time is a "pacing";
the ''space of time" is never converted into the "time of
space," and the words 11 time," "past," "present," "future,"
themselves all have spatially interpretable etymologies.
Again, we have external organs for sensing all sorts of
spatial motion, sights, sounds (which come out of space),
and internal organs for sensing our own spatial position,
and we have a capability for perceiving perspectival transformations. But we have no discernible organ or power for
perceiving the mere elapsing of time. Our estimate of time
depends on the spatial passages from light to dark, from
fresh to worn, from full to empty, and if we are deprived of
their sensory evidence our sense of time becomes totally
confused.
Moreover, time is somehow more accessible than space.
We can "spend time" to gain space. Time serves to pass
through space:
Now when Joseph had named his underworld name to the
Ismaelite, and had indicated to him what he wished to be
called in Egyptland, these people trekked on, some days, several and many days, at an indescribably comfortable pace and
full of serenity concerning time, which would one day, they
knew, manage to overcome space, if one cooperated but a little-and would do this most surely if one didn't fuss but just
gave in to its progress, each of whose advances might be of no
account but which would, quite incidentally, run up a large
sum, if only once carried on and reasonably maintained one's
direction. [Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt]
One may even recover, in some sense, one's former place
in space. But it is only in a figurative way that one can regain lost times by going down through space, as in archaeological exposure of earlier levels of life. Then, too, time's
effects can be fugitive-a moment of bliss can sometimes
obliterate a season of suffering, but a ravaged place cannot
be healed without the investment of laborious motion. In
brief, spaces and places contain the passages that concern
us, that is, they contain time, but not the reverse.
I take all that as suggestive, though of course merely circumstantial, evidence that time is not even coordinate
with space, as a form of appearances, not to speak of being
prior. Proof of such an assertion there cannot be beyond
its possibly convincing consequences. But I can, at least, in
concluding my brief collection of the evidence against
time and for space try to invalidate the chief presumptive
mark of their separate and coordinate standing. That is the
supposed difference between the here and the now: The
here, it is said, is repeatable; the now is not.
The claim certainly holds for the mathematical representation of space and time, though merely by definition.
In a graphic coordinate system with a time-axis the space
coordinates can return as often as you please, while the
SUMMER 1983
�able that we might, by a slightly different route, come back
to the same moment. For if events had the cyclicality of a
circle, as Nietsche claims (Note 13), every now would be
antecedent to itself and to all others, and if events moved
as in a figure eight, the same now would be on different
approaches. Whether we then said that it was the same
present floating out of the mists of time gone into the
murk of time to come. It seems to me that the world so
purged of time is a more patent world. In it shapes pass by
us, but also we, at will, pass by them. Sometimes it is in our
power to recognize appearances; we are able to turn back,
to revisit the scene, to follow its figures as they pass by or
to ascend to a higher viewpoint so as to survey the whole
panorama simultaneously. Appearances which carry that
possibility we call spatial. Some variations, however, we
can only remember; they go past us and are beyond perceptual recovery. They back out of our sight, so to speak, by
changing not so much their place as themselves, so that we
now because its perceptual content was the same, or a dif-
can no longer train our sensory vision on them at will. So
ferent now because it had different antecedents, would
depend on our desire to make the configurations of the
world tell time or to make the advance of time distinguish
its configurations. In principle and in imagination a pas·
sage which is an extended causa sui is not impossible, and
therefore neither is the return of a now. I leave out of account here that unmodern "defence against Time"
(Eiiade) constituted by the celebration of the timeless,
original, and ever-repeatable moments of myth.
Similarly, as far as the here is concerned, is it so obvious
that we can always come back to it? It seems to me that
there are three kinds of here: There is the local mathematical point given by an origin and three coordinates, which is
exactly repeatable but is only the abstraction of a here.
There is the physical situation determined by reference to
a system of moving bodies which can be only relatively recovered as one system moves with respect to its next larger
containing system (as does the cluster of people on the
boat on the ocean in the solar system, and so ad infinitum).
And finally, there is the human place of our lives which
probably cannot in effect be regained because, no matter
how stable, the world's passing affects its colorations
and conformations, as well as the mood of the returning
the golden solids oflate afternoon plane out into the dusky
silhouettes of early evening, and no one can hold them.
Such perceptually irrecoverable passings are usually accompanied for us by a sense of loss or relief or, at least, of
watchfulness. These we call temporal. But if we do not
care enough about their passing, not even enough to
glance at a watch, then, there being no one to feel or tell
time, the passages remain untimed. Of course, to attempt
to imagine this untimed world is a contradictory undertaking, that of trying to attend while not attending.
Nonetheless, we could try to reach untimed passage. It
would amount to thinking about appearance in its variability as distinct from being involved in it. It would mean being on the approaches of the mystery of Appearance.
Here, it seems to me, would start the real pursuit: What
appears? What principles of self-sameness and everotherness can account for the determinate shapes appearance manifests in its endlessly varying variety? Must appearance be perceived to appear? Is it nothing or
something in itself? And what is perception? What is
space, that field and frame in which, or perhaps, as which,
appearance shows itself? What rules, causes, ends govern
that distinguishable variation of appearance called motion
or passage?-This is the great battle ground to which leads
the skirmish against time.
time coordinates must increase monotonically. But is it so
plain in life that the now never returns? Is it so certain that
a deja vue is always a pathological incident? But even if, in
publicly corroborable fact, no now is indeed ever repeated
because chances are overwhelmingly against the world's
passages ever returning to the same state, yet it is imagin-
perceiver.
Therefore it seems to me that, insofar as they are separable notions at all, the now can be as repeatable as the here
and the here as irrecoverable as the now-which is to
say that time and space are not distinguishable, at least by
that mark. That melancholy of the missed rendevous described above (Sec. I 4), when we come to the right place at
the wrong time, is, then, not the unavoidable consequence
of the inherent skewness of space and time, but rather a
temporal affection, a mood of diminution, the ebb tide of
our awareness, when we can take notice of nothing which
does not flaunt itself in front of our eyes. For if time is
noticed passage, the vitality of our sense of time and of our
sense for times past and times future will depend on the
scope of our receptivity.
The object of the foregoing exercise in suppressing our
image of time as bearing onward the shapes of space was
to quell our propensity for insinuating time into our
speech as an occult nature and into our lives as a flux bear-
ing us from oblivion to oblivion on the narrow raft of a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The results of a substancial reflection are sometimes a
bit bizarre, and their justification lies in their intention.
Mine is to give an account of the three phases of time
which lend to human life much of its pathos.
3. THE PHASES OF TIME
Let me begin by readmitting the absurdly unavoidable
thought which I had earlier proscribed: that if things had
not come to the present juncture they would not be here.
Sequences of appearances commonly seem to have, if no
humanly ascertainable drift or even much recollectable
continuity, at least a certain longitudinal connectedness.
But how do we know of that connection? Space lies open
before us in brilliant extendedness. It has no before and
after, being, all that there is of it, there. How can it also
display the past variety of its passages? How, in short, does
93
�the present world bear witness to those of its states that
have passed, to its past? What lets us interpret a fossil as
testimony of life's evolution? What compels us to ascribe a
tender babyhood even to the most desiccated adult? What
makes a place revisited a place almost regained? What reconstitutes the sherd at the bottom of a Greek well into a
goblet from a world gone by?
The answer is that we do it, we give the world its past
because we have the power of memory. For itself the
grandest mountain range, which to us expresses in its ma-
jestic presence the dignity of having been shaped by the
passage of aeons, has no past and no world, and neither
does the little loom-weight which once put tension on the
warp of Penelope's loom. The depth of space is ours because we have memory. It makes time and its phases possible. Not as the poet says:
How the imaginaiion (and thus the memory) might do
its work is a question Aristotle tacitly sets aside and Kant
answers by saying that it is a mysterious power hidden in
the depth of the soul. It seems to me of all philosophical
questions the most engaging, but for another occasion.
(See Note 35 for a formulation of its aspects.) In the mean·
while I will mention one-most crucial-feature of its
work: In holding objects without their presence it is always
intentional, for the retained form is an image of, or intends, the once present thing, and therein precisely lies its
memorial power, its ability to re-present, to present the absent. (There may indeed be moments when remembering
passes into reliving, when the memory-image intends its
object not as an object that was, but as a present object,
but such states are, like hallucinations, extraordinary.)
How does the memory-imagination bring about the
three temporal phases or present, past, and future?
... only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" I,
from Four Quartets
but the opposite: the moments of memory first constitute
past and future.
What is memory? The past-making memory is of the
imagination. (I omit consideration of rote, short-term, motor, and verbal memory, and of those electronically stimulated, hallucination-like replays of the "memory-tape"
which attest to the physical basis of the human activity of
remembering.) The imagination I understand to be in the
first instance the power for absorbing the world's variety
into assorted shapes and coherent processes, a discerning
receptivity not at that point distinguishable from the
power of perception. It is, in this aspect, a faculty universally and subconsciously exercised. (Kant, in his own context, calls it the productive imagination because it first produces those unities of thought and sense which he calls
"phenomena.") Secondly and properly speaking, it is a ca·
pacity for holding the form of things without their matter,
as Aristotle says, or the object without its presence, in
Kant's terms; both formulations come to the same thing
when one recalls that for Aristotle the material is a required element of the substantial presence of a physical
object. Its dematerializing power is indeed what makes its
holding capacity plausible. For one psychic space (leaving
aside the physical basis of memory) seems able to contain
myriads of memories. I am not speaking of psychic space
altogether figuratively but describing the interior experience of imagining which seems to be primarily visual, or
better, pseudovisual, presumably because sight is the
sense most adequate to the extendedness of space (cf.
Note 35). And although images are extended, they do not
seem necessarily to displace or occlude one another; images are, so to speak, transparent to images.
94
a. The Present
The now is also called the present, and nowness is associated with presence. A "presence" (Greek: parousia)
means a being that is by us, a confronting being which is
immediately there. Let us call it perceived being, leaving
out of account here the whole problem of perception itself. In this phase the imagination works as the involuntary
power described above, which shapes sensory material
into perceived appearances, though some argue that the
world itself delivers fully shaped appearances (Gibson).
People whose imaginative power is exhausted in this first
function accordingly live in the present and prefer adventitious stimulation to memories and projects. It is this nowpresent which Heidegger combats.
Being perceptible defines what is in the present, but I
think its marks are not those usually stated: vividness, selfgivenness, uniqueness. For the present can be dim and
dreary, like a city parking lot on Sunday; and sights of
things by no means present can come to us unbidden and
adventitiously as do phantasms and hallucinations; and
many a present scene is worn out with repetition.
What is peculiar to the present, then, is that it is perceived,
that it declares itself to us through the conduits of sensation
with a normally bland-though sometimes stunningimmediacy. Indeed, it is one of the mysteries of perception
that our intermediary senses can leave us with so strong a
sense of the immediacy of appearance. Besides being characterized by being right there, before us, perception also
promises a certain completeness of perspective and detailing. The present picnic includes those garbage cans behind the bushes and the proverbial ants on the blanket
which the past idyll has simply occulted.
If the present is defined by the immediate presence of
appearances and their passages, we should speak of the
now not as an ever-new moment, but rather as the unvary-
ing condition of being and having a present. This now is
SUMMER 1983
�our ability to be in and with the world. That ever-other,
ever-same now of the time-flow which is thought of as be·
ing at once the leading edge of time and also the cut be·
tween past and future arises when we stop the passages of
appearance to take notice of our relation to their passing.
The present becomes a flux-now when reflection brings
the world up short-the now arises from self-interruption.
This is the now which our mathematical reason is com·
pelled to whittle down to an unextended point. Percep·
tion, on the other hand, insists on its elongation. From this
conflict arises the bastard notion of the "specious
present": When we consciously represent our timeconsciousness, we do it by means of a line which underlies
a set of dimensionless points, while we observe that our
actual perceived present is an extended "space" of time,
composed of a braid of retentions of just-passed passages.
(That the actual present "takes time" accords with common experiences, for example the curious exchanges of
present and past at the moment of receiving sudden bad
news; the shocked consciousness oscillates for a while between the apprised now of the present and the yet unsuspecting now of the immediate past.)
In sum, when left to its own devices, the present is not
now but always, or better: It is always the present. This
ever-present present acts nonetheless as a pivot between
the two other phases of time because through it come the
images which stock the memory, although the memory itself integrates and frames the scene. All that we have there
by way of distinct forms came first through the senses. (Or
perhaps not everything: Augustine regards the memory as
a space furnished not only with likenesses of all the world,
but also inhabited by imageless memories of intelligible
objects. The question really comes to this: which domain
is the larger, imagination or memory? All images, it seems
to me, are at least in their elements memories, but Augustine must argue that some memories are not image-like,
namely those belonging to intellectual learning. It seems
to me a question not here soluble whether such learning is
essentially memorial and I have therefore left it out of
account.)
In going on to the past, let me say something concerning
the relation of flux-time and phase-time. Flux-time, current time, whose being independent of our attention to
passage I am denying, is precisely not, and for just that reason has no power to bear off lapsed passages into nowhere,
it flows not into the past but into oblivion. Instead, phasetime supervenes: As soon as passages are beyond percep-
tion and out of sight, they come to a standstill, so to speak;
they are laid away and accumulate as the permanent stock
of the memory-imagination, available for recovery, and the
more readily available the more we cared at the time. The
hidden work of their consignment to this permanent
mode, called ((consolidation," seems to demand the inter-
vention of other passages, that is, it seems to take some
time, apparently for physiological reasons. Consequently
the recent past i~ often inchoate compared to more reTiffi ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mote events, especially if it has been a monotony of minute differences. What, then, accounts for the being of
past passages, for a passing that has ceased to pass?
b. The Past
The past is the work of the imagination proper. Had we
no such power we would have no past-there would be no
past. It is what Kant calls the "reproductive" imagination.
It makes a world of re-presentations, of secondary occurrences, which are distinguished from perceptions first of
all in this: We move and have our place within the world of
perception, but the world of the imagination is felt to take
place within us. (Though there are memories which approach the sense of presence of a perception; they are usually triggered by one of the two contact senses, smell and
touch, whose deliverances, as it happens, are also hardest
to make into memory-images.)
Aristotle thinks that we sense time, and therefore that
the imagination, which holds memories, also holds their
times. The difficulties of this view seem to me insuperable. (See Sec. II 3). For first, it is hard to conceive what
such a time storage might mean. Does it mean that to
reach a memory we must recount the time back to it, so
that to remember a childhood scene we must reproduce
the intervening decades? That would make remembering
in principle impossible, because while we were working
our way back into memory, the present would carry us forward at a clip equal but opposite. Does it mean that we
have, as Aristotle claims, an internal time-scaling capacity,
a kind of speeding up of the inner temporal flux with an
index of its ratio to the actual time? Not only is there, I
have argued, no such flux, but pure time (as distinct from
its count) is, unlike space, incapable of proportionality because its stretches cannot be compared to each other by
congruence. Precisely that mysterious property of the
memory-imagination which makes it capable of containing
the world, namely that its spaces can, so to speak, continually be rescaled, that very property makes it incapable of
containing the world's time, which cannot be scaled.
Besides, the phenomena of memory are all against a
temporally flowing memory medium. Memory is notoriously discrete. The forgettable, a mere temporal stretching, is forgotten. Memory-images float up or flash on in
isolation, and time is remembered, if at all, not by being
condensed but by being excerpted. At any rate, although
the physiological basis for recalling every instance of our
life may exist, it would not only be impossible in principle,
as I argued above, to recover the continuum of our lifetime, but it would be in practice a waste of our present to
try to recover even parts of our past temporally. Indeed, I
think it is plain impossible to remember the passage of
time through time.
Consequently, the time-keeping performance of memory is, in fact, quite unreliable. Between the first and the
95
�final instance of a daily routine we merge the recurrent
events into one schema; it is that summary foreshortening
of an orderly life which is the source of so much distress
and so much comfort. We lose days from our calendar, but
we also multiply moments and think that we did often and
long what we did skimpily and briefly-exercises, for instance. The shades of the remembered dead are nearer
than the persons of the unregarded living, and in old age
our childhood is closer than our middle age. By the public
clock our unchecked memories can be relied on neither
for the length or the continuity or the unperturbed succession of time.
How then do we through memory constitute our past?
Primarily the past is, I think, a series of timeless scenes,
obtained by eyewitness or borrowed, acquired immediately by our own perception or through material images,
for instance, pictures of historical events. These inner, im-
material sights, animated perhaps by unheard sounds, are
marked as memory-images by our awareness that they are
of a once present perceived passage, which has done what
passages do-gone by. That is why memories, unless we
deliberately mobilize them by passing them before our inner vision, have a certain immobility. What T. S. Eliot says
of history holds a fortiori for memory: It is "a pattern of
timeless moments." We remember not the coming and go-
ing of a motion but a representative frame-it might be
called its configura] gist, something like in feeling to pictorial representation of motion by means of flow lines.
Memory-images do possess, secondarily, succession, and
duration, which are therefore characteristics of the past.
Memories have succession because passages leave various,
usually discrete, traces, which we retain in their context.
Certainly not every memory is well and accurately fixed,
and its relations are subject to outside correction by those
who have better recorded, more coherent, memories. But
by and large memories lead into each other or hang together. It is this context character which makes recollection possible. Aristotle in On Memory and Recollection distinguishes between this methodical recovery of a memory
and remembering itself, which is conspicuously capricious, illuminating and occluding scenes uncontrollably.
Remembering seems to be dependent on fortuitous associative triggers (once much studied by Humean psychologists); the most famous literary example of such a memory
trigger is Proust's taste of a tea cake dipped in a tisane
which retrieves for him the bliss of childhood.
The second temporal effect of memory is that of duration, which it achieves by means, so to speak, of its thickness, its lamination. This way of marking a long or a short
time is, of course, highly deceptive by the clock, sincethis is the time theme of The Magic Mountain-full and
eventful but fast passages leave thickly layered images,
while passages long drawn out but eventless leave only
sparse scenes. Of course, the order and the measure of
memory time is subject to correction by correlation with
external clock movements and with others' memories. But
96
the pacing of the original past, our past, can be made equable only by extrapolation and abstraction, since it is constituted in the most inhomogeneous of spaces, our imagination. (I want to add that the reason certain animals show
very precisely paced behavior seems to be not that they
have, any more than we do, an original sense of time but
that they are themselves clocks.)
The memory-imagination, then, is what is alone respon-
sible for the past, for the past as a whole is what is potentially remembered, what the soul has noticed and could recall. The memory-imagination is where the world's
passages find permanence and whence the present can
learn of its own perpetuity; through the memory, space
can testify to time. But even if space were devastated, if
the accumated treasury of civilization were annihilated, if
the present were a void-as long as human memory survived the past would exist.
It should be clear that to say that the past is our doing by
no means implies that it is our invention, to be manipulated for pleasant or pernicious ends. What is our doing is
that there is a past, not what is past. The above-mentioned
intentional character of the memory makes that distinction
possible. A memory-image intends that thing or event of
which it is the memory. What our memorial capacity contains is in one sense something of our own, namely insofar
as it is simply a memory, but in another sense it belongs to
the object remembered, namely insofar as it is a memory
of the object. This double-sided character of memory is
just what makes possible-and therefore obligatory-the
effort to remember truthfully, an effort which feels, at
least, like trying to pass through the memory to its intended object. Something similar holds for that reconstitution of public memory called history. Historical truthfulness seems to me to consist of scrupulously using the
evidence to construct a history-image which is compellingly of something, namely of the way it was. An analogous effort, finally, seems to play a part even in poetry, for
memory is said to be the mother of the Muses.
Before I conclude by arguing that the past is the most
humanly defining and consequential of the three phases
of time, let me dispose of the future.
c. The Future
The future is said to come toward us, and we are supposed to face it. This seems to me to be a misleading figure
of speech. Wherever we face, we confront the present, and
nothing is coming at us or by us but that.
The future, I say, is entirely derivative from the past.
Husser] describes it formally as the inverse of memory.
The future is that mode of the memory in which the image anticipates a perception, whereas in the past it follows.
The future is projected memory. How is that meant?
There are, it seems to me, at least four ways to think of
the future. The first defines the future as the realm of conSUMMER 1983
�tingency. On the hypothesis that there "are" indetermi·
nate events, the future is that part of the world about
which it is in principle impossible to make true-or-false
statements. This is the future understood in terms of the
use, in the present, of the future tense. (If, however, the
future is supposed to be predetermined, that is to say, if all
passages have an absolutely tight nexus, then future and
past are indistinguishable: It is in principle possible to
make true statements about either and in fact extremely
difficult.) The second way is that the future is an image·
But if they are held desirously and vividly enough, they
immediately go over into projects: Every real action in the
world, no matter how modest, has as its formal and its final
cause an image, and those actions are most felicitous
whose projected image is at home in a Golden Age. A
small but apt example is the making of a garden-every
garden is conceived as a corner in the Garden of Eden,
though its beginning be with the loan of a pickaxe. (I might
add here that it is a blessing for us that every terrestrial
less, calculated projection of present trends, a way as nec-
into the taunting melancholy of the completely fulfilled
imagination.)
One more observation about a projected image which
seems to be kind of a limit of our living future and which
essary as it is fatal to bureaucratic planning; this future is
the present elongated according to rules of conjecture.
The third is the "futuristic" future. Its imagery bears the
marks of a forced attempt to represent the never-yet-seen,
the absolutely novel. This future, which comes out of a
wilful subversion of the past, is usually antiseptically inhuman and terrifyingly technical. (Note, for example, that re·
cent futuristic space movies, like Star Wars and Star Trek,
tend to be humanly hollow and visually weird, while space
movies in a contemporary setting like Close Encounters,
E. T., and the Superman series are suffused with nostalgi·
cally homey, lovingly comic, all-American romance.)
All these futures are, of course, present thoughts and
images marked, as it were, with a future index. I cannot
even conceive what it might mean literally to think future
things, that is, to be with one's thoughts in the future.
There is a fourth future, our lived human future. It is
the projected past, and thus also the past as a project. This
future is always a possible image-not an image of possibilities, for that is an impossibly indeterminate notion; nor a
formulation of possibilities, for that is merely a logical ex·
ercise; nor even a prospectus of possible images, for that is
conjecture and contingency planning. The actual future
with which we live is a settled envisioning of a scene we
deem the world capable of harboring. Such a scene always
comes from memory, not only because without memory
there is no experience with which to judge what visions
are capable of realization, but also because memory is the
space in which diverse perceptions are first transformed
into coherent patterns. For it is from memory-images that
we shape our aim-images. Indeed, Bergson claims that
memory is primarily action-oriented, though that "to call
up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to
withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we
must have the power to value the useless, we must have
the will to dream." However, I hope to show that memory
has even deeper work than future-dreaming.
Such memory-projections may come to nothing and return to memory, closed out and abandoned:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
T. S. Eliot "Burnt Norton", I
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
paradise requires continual maintenance or we would fall
concerns the one event sure of realization, our death. We
come on our death, it seems to me, in various ways, for
example, as a shapeless terror before an unimaginable termination or as an imagined scene in which we are called
on to play a leading role. That ultimate image will be and
ought to be the occasional subject of meditation. But why
should we, as Heidegger demands, face resolutely, at every
moment, the fact of our own death, understood as the possibility of our not-being, in order for our existence to be
authentic? That death is the end of our being is a mere
surmise, and it is an open question whether the
imagina~
lion, which like Dante's journeys in the middle of this life
to bring back visions of the next, is, delivering phantasies or
memories. Be that as it may, the aspect of the great futural
fact of our death which is most effective in life seems to
me to be that notorious gift of Prometheus, namely our
blindness concerning its exact date, and that is how our
end governs our future. For death has us on an elastic
tether, with give enough, we may always hope, for the
well-paced play necessary to the perfection of any project,
and with tautness enough to snap us eventually back from
diversion to work.
Before proceeding to the past, I want to forestall an objection which might be raised-that in considering the future as projected past I am attributing the order of my
awareness to the order of worldly becoming, with the antic
result that things receive their futurity from my projection, for instance that an old place to which I now first envision visiting is therefore a place of the future. But it is
not the sequence of knowing and being that, as I argue,
makes the future, but my present apprehension of a sequence of modes of awareness: I call future what I expect
to perceive. This view, to be sure, detracts from the pathos
of futurity, from both its inexhorableness and its contingency and implies precisely that there is no future-being.
Indeed such being is an unintelligible notion, for what will
be is not. By being in the future can be meant no more
than this: that the image is posited as coming before the
perception, where "before" is not a temporal relation at
all, for the "coming before" is now; it is in my present "expectation':.
To give the future no being is, however, not to deny that
97
�"shall" and "will" have a strongly effective meaning. To
resolve that "it shall be" is now to recover in the imagination an image-appearance, perhaps to modify it, and to will
to bring it to perception by the proper action. When the
perception becomes actual it is future no longer but
present. To prognosticate that "it will be" is now to anticipate an external appearance and to have well-grounded expectation for perceiving it. We are warranted in such anticipations because the passages of the world usually show
a certain symmetry about the pivotal present, a symmetry
we establish by attending to each memory specifically as a
by-gone present. The shape of ordinary passages, we then
conclude, is distorted very slowly about the perceived
present. In fact, most passages which are important to us
are either cyclical or monotonic, and therefore continuously predictable. There are, or course, moments of crisis,
catastrophic discontinuities which teach us that every
"logic of becoming" so far discovered is unreliable. But it
stands to reason that were the variations of appearance either totally monotonous or totally multifarious, we would
have no sense of a coherent future at all.
What room, one might ask, does this view of the lived
future as projected past leave for newness? The present is
in a superficial sense always novel, because no matter how
accurately it was foreseen or how effectively it was
planned, the world's passages will bring out in us and will
bring before us the unexpected and the adventitious. The
question really concerns a deeper newness: not whether
human beings can put into the world what has merely
never been before, but whether they can establish a wellfounded new way, a novus ordo seclorum. The vision behind such an epoch cannot help but come from the imagination. (I leave out the element of thought because it is so
doubtful that thought is rooted in the phases of time at all.)
The imagination finds the materials for such a vision in
the storehouse of memory, but its affective shaping seems
to come from the power of phantasy. Now both aspects of
the imagination, memory and phantasy, are past-oriented.
The memory is the very source of the past, while phantasy
characteristically works-as a matter of observation-in
the mode of Hance upon a time," of primeval, ancient patterns. Therefore genuinely imagined new beginnings, as
distinct from those that are light-headedly contrived, usually take the form of a rectification, renewal, rebirth-in
sum, of a return to "that time" (illo tempore) which is to be
recovered in a new paradise, a new Golden Age, a New
Jerusalem.
d. The Past as Paramount Phase
Memory-image and phantasy-image, the image arising
from perception and the image made in the imagination,
are distinguished from each other by certain marks. The
intentionality of memory is that of being of an original perception of which it is precisely the memory. A phantasy-
98
image lays no claim to being the memory of a once-present
scene except in play, in the well-circumscribed space,
whose proper phase, I have claimed, is the past, of "once
upon a time." (This distinction between the reality claims
of phantasy and memory can, of course, be confounded in
very fascinating ways.) Consequently memories have a
fairly fixed temporal context, while phantasy and fairy
tales take place in a floating time frame.
But in certain fundamental characteristics, memory and
phantasy are the same: Both are representations without
the material presence of the world and subject to the same
transmutations that such absence sanctions. With that
deep bond between the realm of phantasy and of the past
in mind, let me now enumerate reasons why the past, constituted in memory, is the humanly preponderant of the
three phases of time.
First, the past is, of necessity, thicker in texture and
longer in extent and therefore weightier for us than our
immediate present. For while we have indeed always a
present, not everything that we have is always present.
Why then should we be willing, having put ourselves to
the trouble of living, to lose our life to oblivion? Even
more, the past contains not only all our own accomplished
passages but is indefinitely extended by the memories we
absorb from the common store, from that derivative memory called history. The past can be an ever-widening panorama, so capacious and so vivid that it may sometimes
seem as if it were, after all, not within us but as if we wandered in it, as in our own interior space. That is how
Augustine speaks of it:
I come into the fields and spacious palaces of my memory,
where are the treasures of innumerable images drawn from
things of whatever sort by the senses .... And yet do not the
things themselves enter the memory; only the images perceived by the senses are ready there at hand .. .. For there I
have in readiness the heaven, the earth, the sea, and whatever
I could perceive in them. [X 8]
Whether we think of our memory-past as an increasing
freight or a widening space, it must inform our life in
action and conversation. The past is present as those select memories which the present has called up to comfort,
goad, or illuminate it. From these memories are distilled
not only the projects of the future but that experience
which enables us to envision the transformation a project
will undergo in the course of realization and its unintended
consequences: most unsound judgement is, after all, a failure of the latter aspect of the projective imagination.
Besides being the source of experience, memory-past
has secondly a clarifying and shaping power. It is often said
that the present is fact, the future possibility, and the past
is necessity. Presence may be called bald fact, though what
the fact is, is rarely known in the present. The future may
be thought as possibility, but it is lived as a vivid picture.
And the past may be in certain gross features unalterable,
but the inner sense of passages is revealed as memory proSUMMER 1983
�gressively revives and reviews them; just as in space proximate objects are invisible until we have gained perspective
on them through distance. So if the past is the necessary,
meaning that of which memory cannot be otherwise (for
we cannot say that past things are necessary, since they are
not at all, being gone), it is so first of all insofar as it has
been laid to rest, as when we say, "let bygones be bygones." Indeed it is yet another power of memory, to forget the best-forgotten, and the price for not exercising it is
the paralyzing repetition of a worn-out present. (I do not
mean that we can expunge the brute fact but that we can
deprive it of its effectiveness. The religious term for that
effort when it concerns our own deeds, is ((repentance/'
which "seeks to annul an actuality," Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, "Interlude 3, The Past.") And secondly, the past is necessary as far as the grossly designatable events and their calendar dates are concerned: for
example I believe it was Clemenceau who observed concerning the shifting interpretations of the Great War, that
whatever is said, no one will ever claim that on August 4,
1914, Belgium invaded Germany. With respect to such
brute facts, memory merely records.
But for most past passages, memory, when it is called
upon, shows itself to have been active. It has purified the
once-present of its obscuring passions and clarified its patterns. It is this shaped and rectified past which most
strongly colors and directs the present. It is what the poet
means when he speaks of
1
Time which takes away
And taking leaves all things in their right place
An image of forever
One and whole.
Edwin Muir, "I have been taught"
It is our frequent experience that we do not realize what
is going on before our eyes, that the present is shapeless
and imperfect, that appearances must reappear in memory to show what they were meant to be. What is ongoing
has presence merely, but what is past shows its essence.
Third, the panoramic, projective, and purgative capacities of the memory-imagination make it the great propaedeutic power for philosophy. For example, out of its store
are fashioned those cosmic visions which complete the arguments of reason, as do the myths in the Platonic dialogues. Again as the room which holds the world without
its material presence, it provides the field of a first encounter with immaterial form. And further, because of its rectifying, schematizing, canonizing tendency, the memory ac·
quaints us with ideality, whether in the schemata of
geometry or in the types of excellence. Finally, the memory is a training ground for philosophizing, because concentratedly pursued remembering, or recollection, has features analogous to searching thought.
Fourth and last, the memory-past has a power of transfiguration, of enchantment. Its force is such that those under its spell may melt with nostalgia even for hell on earth.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In this mode memory saturates with feeling what it has
purged of passion. Now its scenes float up fragrant with an
illumination of inexpressibly familiar mystery and its set·
tings are suffused by an enigmatically musical aura. Proust
describes these atmospheric colorations as turning the
memory-world into a hieroglyphic of happiness whose decipherment is an enthrallingly exigent task.
Proust is both the painstaking initiate and the exploiting
connoisseur of the magic of memory. His acute temporal
sensibility presents him with an absorbing problem: He
has discovered that on the one hand, "the true paradises
are the paradises we have lost," while on the other, only
the immediacy of perception can add the last perfection,
that of real existence, to these paradisical memories. He
finds that he can succeed in his search for lost time only
when a sensory trigger perceived in the present, and iden·
tical with some element of the past such as that taste of
the teacake, revivifies his memory. Then past and present
become one and the past is literally relived. This fusion of
temporal phases he calls "pure time."
There is something fascinating and something repellent
in Proust's self-immured pursuit of the past not as a template for the future but as means to momentary bliss.
What he describes is, as it happens, the most magical of
temporal experiences-when the past lies upon the
present as a luminous transparency, or behind it like a vibrant backdrop, or within it like animating music. In spite
of, or better, precisely for the sake of, the magic, it seems
to me sounder not to importune the past for golden moments but to let them come as they will, and when they
come to let them do their proper work, which is not only to
bring delight but also to be the source of ardour for a
worldly project.
So profiting by Proust's case, we should probably avoid
too direct a preoccupation with our paradise-producing
power. Otherwise much more might be said, particularly
about its close relation to music. For music is the most memorial of arts. It occurs only minimally in the present and
the whole burden of its being is on memory, since the apprehension of a musical whole depends on retention, as
Husserl has named the quasi-perception of passages just
now past, while the recognition of its intention depends
on the memory of all the music heard before. But most to
my point here, music is the art which best aids and intensifies the significance-producing function of our memoryimagination because, as can no other art, it suffuses space
with feeling and vivifies it with intimations of schemata of
the body which stand for gestures of the souJ.l6 But of
such musings there is no end.
*
*
*
To conclude: The soundness and the fulness of our existence seems to me to begin with a right relation to the
three phases of time. Of these the present with its passions
is loud enough in its own behalf, and when it is dimmed it
99
�is very often because of our improvident preoccupation
with the future. Here I have brought forward the past and
its images not only because it is the forgotten phase of our
time,l7 but because I really think that it has the dignity I
have ascribed to it: It is the depth of the present and the
shape of the future.
The wholeness of life and half of its happiness comesand its coming depends on good fortune and work, and
above all, on single-minded desire-when the present
world is perceived against a deep, luminous background of
memory, which is at once also a prospect into the future
and a project. That temporal whole (it cannot rightly be
called a present and I have no name for it) will sometimes-not often-submit itself to thought and invite contemplation. That is, I think, the complement of temporal
completeness and a consummation of human happiness.
Let my witness be, one last time, Aristotle, speaking of
that human being-perhaps a little beyond our meanswho will be the best friend and live the happiest life (Nic.
Eth. IX, on friendship, 1166 a 14 ff.):
He is in harmony with himself and has the same desires
throughout his whole soul ... Such a one wants to be in his
own company since he makes it pleasant for himself. For he
has delightful memories of what he has done and good hopes
for what is to come, and finally, his mind abounds in objects
of contemplation.
Santa Fe, Summer 1982
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787) B 46-72:
"Transcendental Aesthetic: Of Time"; A 98-110: the
three syntheses; B 150-159: "Of the Application of the
Categories to the Objects of the Senses in General"; B
176-187: "Of the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of
the Understanding"; B 274-279: "Refutation of Idealism"; B 399-432; A 341-405: "Of the Paralogisms of
Pure Reason."
II. SUPPORTING TEXTS, STUDIES, COMMENTARIES
Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1916-1918),
London 1920, Bk. I, i-iv.
Staffan Bersten, Time and Eternity, A Study in the Structure and Symbolism ofT. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, New
Yark 1973, Ill iii.
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, English version of An
Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889),
F. L. Pogson, trans., New Yark 1960, Ch. II and Conclusion.
Otto F. Bollnow, Das Wesen der Stimmungen, Frankfurt
a.M. 1968, Chps. IV, XII.
Albert Einstein, and others, "On the Electrodynamics of
Moving Bodies" (1905), The Principle of Relativity,
Dover 1952, par. I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1957), P.
Mairet, trans., New York 1975, Ch. I: "The Myths of the
Modern World."
I. MAIN TEXTS
J. N. Findlay, "Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles,"
Aristotle, Physics IV 10-14 (time); III 1-3 (motion); VIII
(primary motion); On Memory and Recollection I (phases
of time); On Coming to Be and Passing Away II 10-ll
(cyclical time). Also: Metaphysics IX, XII; On the Soul
Ill; Posterior Analytics II 12; On Interpretation 9. (4th
cent. B.C.).
Augustine, Confessions (c. 400 A.D.) X 8-26 (memory); XI
10-31 (time).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., New York 1962, First
Part, Second Section, paras. 65, 68-69, 79-82.
Edmund Husser!, The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness (1905), Martin Heidegger, ed., James S.
Churchill, trans., Bloomington 1964, Sec. II "The Analysis of Time-Consciousness"; III "The Levels of Constitution of Time and Temporal Objects."
100
Logic and Language, Garden City 1965, pp. 40-59.
Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being
and Time," New York 1970.
James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston 1966.
John G. Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time, Middletown 1968, Conclusion.
G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia: Philosophy of Nature (1827)
paras. 257-260; Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), Preface.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
(1934), James S. Churchill, trans., Bloomington 1962;
Logik (1925-26), Gesammtausgabe, Bd. 21, Frankfurt
a.M. 1976, Sec. C.
SUMMER 1983
�William James, Psychology, Ch. XVII: "The Sense of
Time."
Phenomenology of Memory, The Third Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology, E. W.
Straus and R. M. Griffith, eds., Pittsburgh 1970.
G. W. Leibniz, "Reply to Bayle's Reflections on the System of Preestablished Harmony" (1702); Third and Seventh Letter to Clarke (1716).
The Problem of Time, Berkeley 1935.
Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927), Boston
1957.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690), Bk. II 14-15.
The Study of Time, Proceedings of the First Conference of
the International Society for the Study of Time, VoL I,
1969, Springer 1972, and subsequent volumes.
Time and its Mysteries, New Yark 1962.
The Voices of Time, J. T. Frazer, ed., New York 1966.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924, begun 1912),
Ch. 4, 2; "Introduction to The Magic Mountain," Princeton Lecture (1939), (Preface to Fisher edition, 1950).
IV. TIME IN SCIENCE
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
(1945), Colin Smith, trans., London 1962, Part III 2.
Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
(1928), London 1947, Chps. III-IV.
Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), Scholium to the Definitions.
Adolf Gruenbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and
Time, Boston 1973, Chps. 8-9, 12.
Plato, Timaeus 37-39.
Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time
(1927), New Yark 1958, Chps. II, IlL
Plotinus, Ennead III 7 (3rd cent. A.D.): Plotin ueber
Ewigkeit and Zeit, Werner Beierwaltes, trans. and ed.,
Frankfurt a.M. 1967.
G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, New York
1963.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1926),
Time Retrieved Ch. 3.
W. D. Ross, Aristotle's Physics, Text, Introduction, Commentary, Oxford 1955.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), Pt. II 2-3.
Most of the collections contain articles on time in science. In particular, Voices of Time: H. Dingle, "Time in
Relativity Theory: Measurement or Coordinate?", p. 455
ff.; 0. C. de Beauregard, "Time in Relativity Theory: Arguments for a Philosophy of Being," p. 417 ff.; M. Capek,
"Time in Relativity Theory: Arguments for a Philosophy
of Becoming," p. 4 34 ff.; R. Schlegel, "Time and Thermodynamics," p. 500 ff.
Charles M. Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, and Time,
Bloomington 197 L
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, H. Diels,
ed., Berlin 1895, pp. 829-832.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1920),
Ann Arbor 1957, Ch. IlL
Eviator Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, Chicago 1981.
IlL
COllECTIONS
Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Time, E. Freeman and
W. Sellars, eds., LaSalle 1971.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
1. A supporting curiosity: the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations reveals a
24: l ratio of time to space sayings. (Study of Time I; p. 313).
2. Merleau-Ponty (p. 411) presents an analysis of the puzzle. If time were
like a river it would indeed appear, on its own, to flow from the past into
the future, namely from the source toward the distant mouth, in the direction a twig floats. But a river unobserved really has no events or temporal direction, for these require an onlooker's perspective: "Time presupposes a view of time." So no unwatched river can represent time.
Now introduce an observer, and the "motion" of time is straightaway
reversed: The waters flow from the source at the observer and pass him,
so that time comes toward him as he expects it and passes out of sight,
that is, it flows from future to past.
3. Findlay, p. 41
4. Newton distinguishes "absolute, true, and mathematical time," which
is a condition of motion, from relative or apparent time, which is the
common time measured by motion. His physical motive for positing absolute time appears to be his belief that rotary motion is absolute, an assumption criticized by Leibniz in De Motu.
Leibniz speaks of mathematical time as "ideal." It is nothing in itself
101
�but an idea in the mind of God (Seventh Letter to Clarke), namely that of
the order of mutually inconsistent possibilities (as space is the order of
possible coexistences); it expresses the order-relations of phenomena
which cannot be simultaneous but are connected-note well, the rela·
tions of phenomena, not of the substances themselves. His chief reason
for objecting to absolute time is the principle that contingent truths, i.e.,
truths of fact, must have a sufficient reason. Now if time were absolute
and instants existed in themselves, one might reasonably ask why God
did not create the world a year sooner, and claim that by choosing this
particular beginning he acted without reason, arbitrarily. But if time is a
mere relation of phenomena, the world made a year sooner is in every
respect in discernibly different from the later world, and the question is
obviated (Third Letter to Clarke).
Augustine partly anticipates this argument: If any giddy brain should
ask why God forbore creating the world for innumerable ages, the answer
is, God does not in time precede time (XI 13). Time arises simultaneously
with the creation, or better, with the creature. Sec Sec. III.
5. Of course, physically speaking, to ignore the finiteness of the speed of
light reduces relative to classical kinematics.
6. Alexander's work, Space, Time and Deity, a very large book of lectures
given from 1916-1918, has as its beginning thesis the interdependence of
space and time: "There is not an instant in time without a position in
space and no point of space without an instant of time." (1, p. 48). Although Alexander had read of relativity theory, his treatment, which is
purely philosophical, is quite independently conceived.
7. Wyndham Lewis interprets the preoccupation with time in all departments of human activity as a romantic reaction; he understands by romanticism a fluid, indeterminate, sensation-seeking, sophisticated rebellion against distinctly formed reality (Ch. 1).
8. Phenomenology, Preface, par. 45 (Miller, trans.). In the passage Hegel
draws attention to the fact that there is no temporal counterpart to geometry. Space is the existence into which the Concept writes its distinctions
as into an empty, dead element. Time, on the other hand, is the pure
unrest of life, absolute differentiation and negativity.
9. See "Chronos," Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopaedie. Cronos, the father
of Zeus who devoured and later disgorged his own children, was sometimes identified with Chronos, Time.
10. Simplicius is right when he shows at length that time does not move,
but mistaken when he gives that as the reason why Aristotle does not
include time among the categories in which motion occurs (on Phys. 225
b 5). Aristotle does in fact include the category of "how much" or quantity, in which time, as it happens, belongs. What he omits is "when,"
which is the category not of time but of timing-of which more below.
ll. Aristotle discusses his analogue to space, i.e., "void" just before motion (213 b ff.). He regards its pure infinite dimensionality as a physical
absurdity in which all motion becomes impossible for lack of any natural
direction toward a place. For Aristotle things are contained in demarcated places, not spread out over a continuous substrate of infinite extension.
12. When Timaeus-not Socrates-tells how time arose, simultaneously
with the heavens, as a moved image of "eternity" (a-ion, the un-going), a
"likeness of the ungoing, going according to number," he, is giving the
mythological anticedent of Aristotle's treatment of time in terms of the
number of motion and of the heavenly motion as providing the measures
of time.
13. The logical possibility of Such necessary cycles is given iri. Post. An. (11
12). Those cycles of becoming are non-contingent whose events imply
each other.
Aristotle's cyclicalit'y is indeed a forerunner of Nietzsche's "Eternal
Return:" "That everything returns is the most extreme approach of a
world of becoming to a world of being: Summit of the inquiry" (Will to
Power, no. 617). In the Eternal Return the impossible is accomplishedto be in the same now twice and so to be causa sui (if causation is temporal). Consequently every moment is, so to speak, a discrete eternity, composed of all the previous identical moments, and the future comes at the
now out of the past. The difference from Aristotle's theory is that this
cycle is not conceived as an approach to God and has no final cause beyond itself, but is intrinsically necessitated.
In the Statesman (269 ff.) Plato lets the Eleatic Stranger tell of a yet
102
more curious cyclical sequence. It is a time· fable playing on the possibilities of time reversal. In the primary age Cronos, i.e., Time (see Note 9),
takes the tiller of the world. Human beings spring grey-haired from the
earth and grow into childhood, fruit ripens without culture; animals are
tame and human beings understand their language; there are no families
and no cities. In our present age the god has let go and the world unwinds
itself. We are no longer the wards of the god, but are humanly generated,
meagre, and exposed. Prometheus and Athena have given us arts and
wisdom to make this life bearable. The Stranger declines to decide which
age is happier since he does not know what was the disposition of the
Cronians with respect to knowledge and philosophy. The fable means
that the era of human independence is more diverse and more difficult
than the cycle guided by the god and that its temporality is, as it were,
fallen and inverted since the phases of imperfection are prior to the states
of perfection. Yet the fable also implies that in the Cronian age philosophy may be an unwanted superfluity, while in the human age it is an
ineradicable need.
A story of immense cycles, repeated through an "infinity" of time, a
serial sequence of development and destruction in human affairs is told
by the Athenian in Laws (676 ff.)
14. For a fine exposition of Aristotle's definition of motion see Joe Sachs,
"Aristotle's Definition of Motion," The College, Jan. 1976, pp. 12-18.
15. Gunnell, p. 232
16. I use the term perception to distinguish the work of the faculty of
sensation from that of the sense organs. As Aristotle does implicitly, so
Whitehead explicitly distinguishes between the point-now which he calls
"moment" and the duration yielded by sense perception. The "moment"
is defined in terms of "abstractive sets" of duration. An abstractive set is
all the nested durations converging to the same limit, and a moment is
defined as the class of all such sets converging to the same limit, each set
being a different "route of approximation" to the same moment (pp. 5762).
17. The relation between time and eternity is similarly quasi-contemporaneous; in distinction from the temporality of human thought, divine
thought is the same with itself through the "whole" of eternity (Met. 1075
a 11).
The scholiast on Nic. Eth. 1174 b 9 wrongly but understandably speaks
of the now as an "atom of time," that is, a minimal of time, a moment.
This is a notion Aristotle takes pains to reject (Phys. 220 a 27), though he
does speak of the limiting point of a period of time as "indivisible" (223 b
34).
18. Aristotle refers to motion "in" the soul in the absence of sensation
(Phys. 219 a 6), to imagination and opinion as "a certain kind of motion"
(254 a 30), and to "changes" of mind (218 b 21).
19. Interestingly enough, such double consciousness is just what Husser\
observes in that internal time flux which seems to him the basic temporal
phenonmenon (par. 39): While we are conscious of the passing of a temporal object like a melody we are also conscious of the time flow itself.
20. Taking his clue from Plato's Timaeus, the Neoplatonic Plotinus elaborates a grand ontological cosmology in which time plays a role quite the
opposite from that in Aristotle (Enneads III 7).
The two relevant elements from the Timaeus arc these: The cosmos is
an image of being and the soul encompasses it.
Time, says Plotinus, "fell out of eternity" (11, 7) because of an original
flaw in the soul, a kind of grasping busyness which keeps the soul from
abiding in self-sufficient quiet and causes it always to look to the next
thing, to something beyond the present. for the soul is itself a variable
and discursive image of the intellect (Beierwaltes, p. 54). Hence it falls
into a sort of motion, a kind of self-displacement. As it accomplishes a
stretch of its journey, time is produced as an image of eternity. Speaking
less metaphorically, the soul "temporalizes" itself (echr6nesen, 11, 30),
making time instead of eternity. Within time it produces the place of variability, namely the sensible world as an image of eternity. Therefore the
world, which moves within the soul, is, not altogether metaphorically, in
time and serves time. Time, in opposition to Aristotle, is not the number
of motion but that in which and by which motion is possible (8; 9, 4).
Since time comes from a kind of greed for continual self-exceeding, it is
in its very essence futural; the soul looks ahead and draws the future
through the now, which by nature always goes out of itself, into the past;
SUMMER 1983
�it is continually cancelling the now. This passage defines time: Time is
the life (zoe) of the soul in a transitive motion from one life-phase (bios) to
another(!!, 44). But as time is only an image of eternity, so temporal life
is merely homonymous with the eternal life of the_ intellect (ll, 49). The
time of the world soul and world time are the same; and since all souls are
one, the same time also appears in each human soul (B, 67).
The first question about time must be: Is it of the soul or of the world,
is its source consciousness or reality? Plotinus' grand scheme, in making
time the life of the soul and making the soul the animating generator of
the world, collapses this distinction: It is precisely in being of the soul
that time is in the world.
21.. Whitrow, pp. 78 ff.
22. For example: that we can reach a memory, either randomly, by a
"glancing ray," or systematically, by a process of attention (a distinction
roughly the same as that made by Aristotle between remembering and
recollecting, On Memory and Recollection II); that the clarity of a presentified object is distinguishable from the clarity of the presentification;
that there are memories of memories, and also memories of objects we
have never perceived such as historical scenes; that every memory is
fixed in an unalterable temporal environment even as it runs off from the
present; that the perception of time and the time of perception correspond; that memory is distinguished from phantasy by a factor of "positing," i.e., by being given a definite temporal position with respect to the
present.
23. I have omitted in this account that connecting of concepts called
judging, which is required to complete experience (B 187 ff.).
24. Locke, for example, presents a theory of time in which there is succession without an underlying flux. Our mind contains a "train of ideas,"
a succession of objects of thinking, from which we derive our idea of duration by reflection. Duration is "fleeting extension," the perpetually
perishing part of succession (Essay II 14, 1). The theory neatly takes a
middle ground between Aristotle's psychic counting of external motion
and Kant's original, undifferentiated inner flux.
25. Aristotle distinguishes, under somewhat shifting terminology, between thought or intellection (nOesis) which is the immediate apprehension of form, and discursive thinking (diclnoia, e.g., Met. 1027 b 25). In a
comparison with the Kantian faculties, pure intellect (nous) would be
contrasted with the transcendental apperception or pure reason, human
noesis with conceiving or understanding, and dianoia with judging.
26. In the original Transcendental Deduction (A 98-102) Kant distinguishes three phases of the unifying synthesis performed by the apperception and assigns to each a faculty: I. The synthesis of apfJrehension in
intuition, an original taking-up into awareness and temporal ordering of
the manifold of sensation. 2. A synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, an original associating or connecting of representations of objects in
their absence which makes remembering possible. 3. A synthesis of recognition in a concept, by which what is successively sensed and then remembered is recognized and united in one concept.
On the face of it the distinctive temporal phase-if the syntheses are
indeed to be temporally interpreted-would seem to be the past: cumulative apprehension, reproduction, re-cognition. Nonetheless Heidegger
makes a fascinating case that Kant has implicitly prefigured his own account of the origin of all three phases in the future by showing that the
syntheses correspond exactly to his three temporalizing ecstases of human existence: The apprehensive synthesis corresponds to "originary
presentification," the reproductive synthesis to "repetition" of what has
been, and the synthesis of recognition to the "anticipation" of understanding (Kant and Metaphysics par. 33; Sherover, pp. 186 ff.; for Heidegger's reinterpretation of the imagination as understood in the Critique
see Sherover, pp. 142, 150).
27. l. Plotinus anticipates Heideggcr in the central notion of the selftemporalization of the soul, and in regarding the future as the essence of
time (See Note 20).
2. Hegel's abstruse dialectical exposition of time in the Philosophy of
Nature (paras. 257-260) is meticulously but critically interpreted by
Heidegger (Logik, par. 20; Being and Time, par. 82 a). Its gist is as follows.
In his dictum that "the truth of space is time," i.e., that space in being
thought reveals itself as time, Hegel is opposing the commonsense apprehension of their disjunction. Space, for Hegel, is the indifferent mutual
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
externality of the manifold of points: "Space is punctuality." Each point
in this manifold is a negation insofar as it discriminates a difference in
space, although the point is not distinguishable from space. That is how
space represents itself to us, to begin with.
Now when the point-space is subjected to thought, when it is not
merely represented but actually conceived, that is to say, when its truth is
brought out, the point, or rather each point, is determined. For thinking
is determination, i.e., delimitation and distinction. So each point is distinguished from the manifold and set for itself: It is this point, not that
point. Hence negativity, space, has in turn been negated. This negated
negativity is the "twth" of space, namely the point conceived, and it is
time. For in being so determined for itself, the point's indifference with
respect to other points is cancelled; it steps out of its own indifferent
condition, although it maintains its indifference to its neighbors. Thus it
no longer lies in a paralyzed quietus of space but, so to speak, gets a move
on, rears itself up, outdoes or succeeds itself: It becomes a now. And the
successive determination of this now and that now, the continual negating of spatial negativity, that is time. "In time the point has actuality,"
namely as now. The complementary positive concept of time is "intuited
becoming," by which Hegel means the disappearance of specifically experienced nows.
Heidegger is critical of Hegel's understanding of time as the mere nowsequence of which his own work is a critique. (See Sec. V 1). He does note
that time as negating negativity is formally identified by Hegel with subjectivity (self-overcoming), but he fails to mention at all in the Logik, what
in Being and Time (omitting reference to the later lectures on the Phenomenology,) he discounts as a mere formality, namely that in the Philosophy of Spirit, which goes beyond the physical time of the Philosophy of
Nature, this identification raises time to an all-encompassing stature:
Time is the existent Spirit itself, the Spirit externalized. Here time is no
longer a mere succession of nows; indeed, the notion that time is subjectivity is at least a way station to Heidegger's temporality as the ground of
human existence.
3. Bergson gets short shrift (Logik, par. 21), but he too anticipates
Heidegger in certain elements: A first such anticipation is Bergson's emphasis on the essential temporality of human life which is in accord with
his understanding of time as a vital, non-discrete, non-numerable qualitative and interpenetrative heterogeneity called "duration proper." A second -is in Bergson's understanding of the origin of quantified, countable
time as externalization, that is to say as a spatialization of true duration,
brought about when consciousness introduces succession into the dead
simultaneity of spatial phenomena. (Spatial phenomena, even when so
modified have no vitality of their own; they only have an unaccountable
property of presenting to consciousness change at successive moments.)
But above all, Bergson precedes Heidegger in the notion of an externalized variant of life which is permitted to unfold in space outside rather
than in time within, and in which "we speak rather than think, we are
enacted rather than ourselves act" (Essay, Conclusion). This externalization of time is surely an anticipation of "inauthenticity."
4. Because of the complex transformation of the meanings I merely
mention Kierkegaard's theological terms "repetition" and "the moment." (For Heidegger's acknowledgement of the latter see Being and
Time II 4, n. iii.)
28. Plotinus, who has a way with words not unlike Heidegger's, uses the
word dicistasis~distance-as a designation precisely of that quantitatively apprehensible succession of time through which its qualitative nature, the unity of its phases, is also displayed as the future continually
passes into the present and the present into the past (Beierwaltes, p. 65).
In the word ecstasis Heisfegger expresses the denial of this diastatic or
sequential unity; for him there is no temporal continuum since past and
present both come directly from the future, though of course not
through a temporal succession but through an ontological derivation.
29. Bollnow (Ch. IV) criticizes Heidegger's existential interpretation of
mood because it posits the "depressed" moods as exemplary and takes no
account of the elevated moods. He seems to me to be right, because the
understanding of "moodiness' (Stimmung) as a disclosure of "having
been" is entirely derived from the interpretation of anxiety as a being
brought back to one's thrownness. But why should the other moods be
similarly grounded in the ecstasis of the past?
103
�30. Heidegger claims that the concept of this vulgar, infinite now-time
which he has established is nothing but the existential-ontological inter·
pretation of Aristotle's definition of time (par. 81). This critique gives no
weight to the fact that this countable continuum is for Aristotle only an
aspect of motion understood as the actualization of being and that its in·
finity and its now-present are precisely regarded as expressing the ap·
proach of becoming to being, to its eternity and its presentness.
31. The lack of an imaginative mode shows up especially in Heidegger's
discussion of the relation of practice to theory (paras. 15, 69 a, b). Each
has its own temporality, but that of the latter is entirely secondary to the
former. Dasein finds itself always already involved in the world and
bound into a context of instrumentality, of "equipment," which is "ready
to hand" for use. Heidegger gives the example of a hammer: The less the
hammer-thing is merely gaped at, the more Dasein seizes hold of it in a
primordial relation much more revealing of its being than any contempla·
tion would be. Only later, usually when some deficiency is encountered
in the tool, does that speculative stance arise, in which Dasein "presentifies" objects to itself as things independent of their use, so that they are
merely "present at hand." Recall that the present is the least prestigious
of the ecstases. Thus practice is a more primordial mode than contempla·
tive theory.
The phenomena seem to me to be misobserved here. From the wideopen receptivity of a baby's eyes to the slow contemplative inspection
which precedes any proper tool-using, every appearance of satisfying human activity seems to begin with imaginative viewing.
32. Whitrow, a very perspicacious writer on natural time, concludes that
from the viewpoint of natural science time is real (pp. 288-290) on the
grounds that the past is determinate, that the present is the moment of
determination or becoming, and that the future is a mathematical construction subject to correction by observation. Then "time is the mediator between the possible and the actual." However, I cannot see why this
mediating power is called time, rather than, for instance, becoming or the
passage of nature (See Sec. VI 2). Whitrow himself names numerous writers among scientists who deny the reality of time. The general difficulty
is that in most of these treatments time is either already defined so as to
enter the discussion as real or that the issue of its reality is not even
raised.
Whitehead, on the other hand, is careful to refrain from using the word
time for his "fundamental fact," the "passages of nature," which includes spatial as well as temporal transitions. The passing of a temporal
duration is an "exhibition" of this passage of nature, which is also responsible for the uniqueness of each act of perception and for the terminus,
i.e., its object (pp. 54-55).
33. The etymology of chr6nos is unfortunately obscure. Both Greek
words for time are masculine, and so, naturally, are the representations.
In English, time, perhaps under the influence of feminine German Zeit,
is sometimes given female attributes: "the womb of time," "sluttish
time" (Sonnet 55), though we also speak of "Father Time."
104
34. A difficulty about making perceived motion precede time might
seem to be raised by the well-known discovery in the physiology of per·
ception that there are quanta of perception, i.e., minimal times, below
which events remain unregistered or subliminal, and threshold speeds
above which the individual position of a mobile cannot be discriminated
and its path appears as a streak. These temporal effects might seem to
imply that time underlies them and is their condition of possibility, were
it not for the fact that this time is itself measured by micro-motions observable to artificially refined perception.
35. The literature concerning the imagination, physiological, psychological, and philosophical, in this century is enormous. Of the last the most
interesting writings seem to me to be those of the phenomenologists.
They take their departure from Husserl's Ideas (1913, especially par. Ill).
The fullest and most original treatment is Sartre's Imagination (1936).
The chief and most absorbing questions about the imagination are: Is
it a faculty? How can it hold sensory objects without a material substrate?
Are images likenesses? Whence comes their special affectivity? What is
spatiality such that we can have an inner space-consciousness? Why are
images primarily spatial and visual? What is the relation of voluntary to
involuntary memory-images? And above all, how is the imagination related to thought: as object, product, instigator?
36. For a lovely study of the dance types of music and how they convey
bodily schemata which in turn express the soul, see Wye Jamison Allanbrook, "Dance, Gesture and The Marriage of Figaro," The College XXIV,
no. l (Aprill974), pp. 13-21.
37. The past is not given priority, at least not by any philosophical writers on time that I know of. For Nietzsche it is the future with its possibili·
ties that conditions the present, since out of it come all valuations, including the true as that which is destined to be. So also it is in the future
that Heidegger grounds authentic human existence. However, for the
most part some kind of present is favored. For example, Sartre transforms
Heidegger's analysis so as to place the ontolo·gical present at the center.
He understands it as the phase in which consciousness makes itself
present to all non-conscious beings, thus originally uniting them as copresent in a world (Being and Nothingness II l b). Hume gives primary
place to the vivid presence of sense impressions, of which memory and
imagination are but pale residues (Enquiry II).
As for the ancients, Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, they honor an
a temporal present, and of them Aristotle with the most authoritative ex·
plicitness: Speaking of the divine intellect he says (Met. 1072 b 14-18):
Its way of life is like the best we have for a brief time. For that being is
always in this state (which is impossible for us), since its actuality is
also a pleasure. And because of that, wakefulness, perception, intel·
lection are most pleasant, and because of these, hopes and memories.
This view of the phases of time as reflecting divine eternity is of course
compatible with the claim that the past is primary in human life.
SUMMER 1983
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Sterling, J. Walter
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Lord, Susan
Fried, S. Richard
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Douglas
Brann, Eva T. H.
Beall, J. H.
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de Grazia, Margreta
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�Editor:
Leo Raditsa
FROM OUR READERS
ON MARRYING
Managing Editor:
To the Editor the St. John's Review:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Susan Lord
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin
Eva Brann
Curtis A. Wilson
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTjOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the autumn-winter, winter-spring,
and summer. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions:
$12.00 yearly, $24.00 for two years, or $36.00 for three years,
payable in advance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's
Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIV
WINTER/SPRING 1983
Number 2
© 1983, St. John's College; "Adam Smith: Political Economy as
Moral Philosophy," © 1983, Gertrude Himmelfarb; "The Media-Shield of the Utopians," © 1983, Rae! jean Isaac and Erich
Isaac; "Benjamin Constant on Ancient and Modern Liberty,"
© 1983 Stephen Holmes. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Left: Americans advancing for attack on Hindenburg Line, 1918,
superimposed on American flag girl, Cambridge, Mass., 1977,
by Dimitri Fotos (with homage to Delacroix). Right, upper: Joseph
Dzhugashvili, police photographs, 1908; Right, lower: Benjamin Con·
stant, silhouette, 1792.
Composition: Action Camp Co., Inc.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
I find two things fuildamenta11y wrong with Ms. Jenson's essay
"On Marrying" (Autumn/Winter 1982-83).
One is what she has chosen to ignore. While she deplores the
ease and rapidity with which unmarried relationships dissolve,
she has ignored completely the very high divorce rate. Currently,
for every lOO people who marry, 50 are divorced. To acknowl·
edge this fact is to take away the basis for her argument that marriage makes love permanent.
In fact, few things last very long in this age. As a society, we
take for granted the ability to move around at great speeds; we
expect to change careers at least once in our lives; we hold jobs,
on the average, for just two years; and we fully expect the various
cars, computers, telephones, and other machines we use every
day to be outmoded in less than a decade. It shouldn't be surprising to note that our love relationships~ whether married or unmarried-partake of the same speed and impermanence that in·
forms everything else we do.
So there is something very much beside the point about Ms.
Jenson's focus on marriage as the salvation of love and permanence in human relations. I might argue for people to plan never
to marry if they would like to stay together, but it would seem a
little irrelevant. When there are structural problems in the
house, it's foolish to argue over what wallpaper to buy.
The second point is somewhat smaller, but still disturbing. Ms.
Jenson does not acknowledge the desire for long-term relation·
ships between homosexuals. Many gay men and women would
like to be married to their partners, but few religious authorities
will perform such a ceremony, and no legal authorities recognize
it. Does this mean all gay love relationships are doomed to impermanence? I don't believe Ms. Jenson cares less about this significant minority than she does about heterosexuals, but she fails to
mention them or the unique problem they face as people who
might wish to marry, but cannot. If she really believes that marriage is what makes love last, it is strange that she doesn't advocate the availability of marriage for gay men and women.
Successful long-term love relationships I'm familiar with are
the result of the individuals' emotional maturity and strength,
and having nothing to do with whether or not the parties involved have cleared their union with the authorities.
jOAN KOCSIS '78
Jamaica Plain, MA
Kari Jenson replies:
I wrote, precisely, to address Ms. Koscis's "structural prob·
lems." I cannot share the seeming equanimity with which she
lumps "love relationships" together with cars and computers. It
is one thing to expect my telephone to be outdated in five years,
quite another to expect the same of my lover. When we use peo-
�'HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTERSPRING 1983
3
Adam Smith: Political Economy as Moral Philosophy
Gertrude Himme!farb
15
Ambiguities in Kant's Treatment of Space Arthur Collins
34
Black and White (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
35
The Media-Shield of the Utopians
Rae/ jean Isaac and Erich Isaac
50
Arrival (poem)
51
Benjamin Constant on Ancient and Modern Liberty
Stephen Holmes
64
65
Sixteen Eighteen (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
Elliott Zuckerman
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907: the "Exes"
Mark Aldanov
77
Poems
81
Letters on Legitimacy
87
Guglielmo Ferrero and Legitimacy
93
My Memoir of Our Revolution
Rachel Hadas
Guglielmo Ferrero-Gaetano Mosca
Carlo Mongardini
Daniel Ardrey
110
With Orjan at the GreatJapan Exhibition (poem)
Elliott Zuckerman
111
The Division of the West-and Perception Leo F. Raditsa
REVIEW ESSAY
140
On Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth
review essay by Gregory S. jones
Inside front cover:
FROM OUR READERS
On Marrying joan Kocsis
�ple in the same way that we use machines, when we regard others as means towards our gratificatio,il, rather than as ends in
themselves, we are indeed in trouble. I intended to sort out a few
of the problems we have with commitment to another human
being, and to learn both what prevents us from forming such a
commitment and, in part, what breaks the tie once formed.
Our high divorce rate is part of the general problem. For the
same reasons that we are so reluctant to marry in the first place,
marriage itself is no longer seen as irrevocable. (Now when we
marry we make financial plans in case of divorce. Even more
laughably, many of us conveniently change the marriage vows to
specify faithfulness "until love ends," rather than "until death
parts us.") When marriage is not understood as a binding institution, as a promise which means something, it must lose much of
its effect.
Only a fool would claim that marriage automatically makes love
permanent. But marriage provides those conditions essential to
love's growth, and without which love will almost surely die. That
the couple who has decided to make their love permanent must
work constantly, and like crazy, goes without saying. Even if I
divorced my husband tomorrow, it would say little about the truth
of my argument, only that I had failed in practice.
I suspect homosexual relationships are in fact more difficult to
sustain for many reasons-among them, the absence oflegal recognition. Homosexual and heterosexual relationships, however,
strike me as essentially different.
2
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Adam Smith: Political Economy as
Moral Philosophy
Gertrude Himmelfarb
If there was a "chasm" in the history of social thought,
as R. H. Tawney held-a chasm between a moral society
and an immoral one, between one organized on the principle of the common good and another one on the principle
of self-interest-it must surely, one would think, be attributed to Adam Smith. John Ruskin called Smith that "halfbred and half-witted Scotchman," who deliberately perpetrated the blasphemy, "Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God,
damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour's goods." 1 It cannot have been an accident that the publication of Smith's
heretical work coincided with two major revolutions: the
American Revolution which professed to speak in the
name of a new Hscience of politics," and the ulndustrial
Revolution" which created the material conditions for both
the new political science and the new political economy.
This theory invites the obvious demurral, that the
Wealth of Nations was not all that revolutionary, either in
its ideas or in its effects. Even the distinctive terms associated with it antedated it by many years. "Political economy" made its appearance as early as 1615 in Antoyne de
Montchretien's Traictii de l'oeconomie politique. The term
was introduced into England by William Petty later that
century, and received wide currency with the publication,
almost a decade before the Wealth of Nations, of James
Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy.
Another French import was ulaissez faire," which goes
back at least to the time of Louis XIV, when a merchant is
reported to have pleaded with the king's minister, Colbert,
Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of
New York, Gertrude Himmelfarb has written On Liberty and Liberalism:
The Case oflohn Stuart Mill (1974), Victorian Minds (1968), Darwin and
the Darwinian Revolution (1959) and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience
and Politics (1952).
The above essay comes from a forthcoming book, The Idea of Poverty:
England in the Early-Industrial Age (Knopf, falll983).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"Laissez nous faire." The phrase was later popularized by
the French Physiocrats in their struggle against the highly
regulated economy of the old regime. Petty preferred the
Latin version, Vadere sicut vult. 2 Smith himself used nei-·
ther the French nor the Latin phrase in the Wealth of Nations. Nor, more surprisingly, did Malthus or Ricardo, although the phrase had come into general usage by their
time. It is ironic that this doctrine, which is thought of as
distinctively English, should have retained its French form
and that to this day there should be no satisfactory English
equivalent. (Neither free trade" nor jjindividualism" expresses quite the same idea.)
The "division of labor," which Smith did use frequently-which was, in fact, the keystone of his workwas adopted, complete with the famous pin-factory illustration (and with the same eighteen operations), from the
Encyclopiidie, the latter probably inspired by the account
of the same manufacturing process (this time in twentyfive operations) in Chambers' Cyclopaedia, published almost three decades before the Encyclopiidie and almost
five before the Wealth of Nations. One historian, claiming
Plato as the source of the idea, pointed out that Smith's
library contained three complete sets of the Dialogues. 3
But Smith could as well have come upon the concept in
Thucydides or Aristotle, or in the work of his own friend
Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society appeared in 1767. Every manufacturer, Ferguson casually remarked, knew that "the more he can subdivide the
tasks of his workmen, and the more hands he can employ
on separate articles, the more are his expenses diminished,
and his profits increased."4
The question of originality had been anticipated by
Smith himself. In 1755, before the publication of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and long before the Wealth of Nations, he wrote a paper claiming priority for some of the
leading ideas of both works, including the principle (al11
3
�though not the phrase) of laissez faire. This and other of
his ideas, he pointed out, had been. the subject of his lectures in 1750, his last year at the University of Edinburgh,
and in the dozen years (1752-64) during which he occupied the chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of
Glasgow. The lectures had been written out by his clerk in
Edinburgh, and he could "adduce innumerable witnesses,
both from that place and from this, who will ascertain
them sufficiently to be mine."5 If Smith's claim was unduly proprietary (and uncharacteristically immodest), it
had objective merit. While specific ideas in the Wealth of
Nations were not entirely novel, the implications of the
work as a whole were. Walter Bagehot put the matter well
when he said that the doctrine of free trade was indeed "in
the air," but it was not accepted or established; "on the
contrary, it was a tenet against which a respectable parent
would probably caution his son; still it was known as a
tempting heresy and one against which a warning was
needed." 6 What Smith did-and this was his historic
achievement-was to convert a minor heresy into a new
and powerful orthodoxy.*
Another kind of priority raises more serious questions.
Was it the intellectual revolution wrought by the Wealth of
Nations (assuming there was such a revolution) that was
decisive, or the industrial revolution presumably reflected
in that work? What in fact was the relation between the
two? It is interesting that after several decades during
which the expression "industrial revolution" fell into disrepute, it has recently been revived and is now used less
apologetically. The timing has been somewhat changed,
the preferred date today being 1780 rather than 1760,
which was the date assigned it by Arnold Toynbee when
he popularized the term a century ago.B The chronology
points to the problem. According to Smith himself the basic thesis of the Wealth of Nations had been conceived as
early as 1750, which suggests that it anticipated the industrial revolution, at least as that revolution is commonly defined (not, to be sure, the division of labor or factories,
both of which existed at the time). Most economic historians, acutely aware of the chronology of technological and
economic developments, tend to minimize the connection
*Joseph Schumpeter was far harsher in his judgment. The Wealth of Nations, he said, contained not a "single analytic idea, principle, or method
that was entirely new in 1776," nothing that would entitle it to rank with
Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin as an "intellectual achievement."
Conceding that it was nonetheless a "great performance" deserving of its
success, he then went on to explain that this success was due to Smith's
limitations.
Had he been more brilliant, he would not have been taken so seriously. Had he dug more deeply, had he unearthed more recondite
truth, had he used difficult and ingenious methods, he would not
have been understood. But he had no such ambitions; in fact he disliked whatever went beyond plain common sense. He never moved
above the heads of even the dullest readers . ... And it was Adam
Smith's good fortune that he was thoroughly in sympathy with the
humors of his time. l-Ie advocated the things that were in the offing,
and he made his analysis serve them.7
4
between the industrial revolution and the new political
economy. Intellectual historians, on the other hand, seeking to ground ideas in sOcial and economic history, use
such words as <~insight" and <~foresight" to signify some
kind of connection, however tenuous.9
Whatever the resolution of this debate-whether it was
from <~ideas" or "reality" that Smith drew his inspiration,
whether the Wealth of Nations was primarily prescriptive
or descriptive-the effect of Smith's work was to give
technology and industry a new and decisive role, not only
in the ·economy but in society. The division of labor (if
only the relatively primitive kind found in a pin factory)
became the harbinger of a social revolution as momentous
as anything dreamed of by political reformers and revolutionaries. It is in this sense that the book was genuinely
revolutionary, in creating a political economy that made
the wealth and welfare of the people dependent on a
highly developed, expanding, industrial economy and on a
self-regulating "system of natural liberty."
Perhaps it was because this revolutionary thesis
emerged so naturally in the course of the book, starting
with the homely illustration of the pin factory, that it was
accepted so readily. Some of Smith's friends were afraid
that the book was too formidable to have any immediate
impact. David Hume consoled Smith that while it required too close a reading to become quickly popular,
eventually, by its "depth and solidity and acuteness" as
well as its "curious facts," it would "at last take the public
attention." 10 In fact, in spite of its forbidding appearance
(two large volumes, a total of eleven hundred pages), the
work achieved a considerable measure of popularity, and
sooner than Hume had anticipated. Within a month of its
publication, the publisher reported that sales were better
than might have been expected of a book requiring so
much thought and reflection, qualities, he regrett~d, that
<~do not abound among modern readers." 11 The first edition sold out in six months, a second appeared early in
1778, and three others followed in the dozen years before
Smith's death. It was translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, and Spanish, and received the ultimate mark
of success in the form of a lengthy abridgement. Smith's
first biographer, writing three years after his death, was
pleased to report that Smith had had the satisfaction of
seeing his principles widely accepted during his lifetime
and witnessing their application to the commercial policy
of England.
There were some critics, to be sure: the economist and
agriculturist Arthur Young, who thought the book full of
((poisonous errors," and the Whig leader Charles James
Fox, who said that he had never read it (although he cited
it in a debate in parliament) and claimed not to understand
the subject but was certain that he heartily despised it. 12
But even the radicals offered little serious objection to it,
some (Thomas Paine and Richard Price, for example) actually declaring themselves admirers of Smith. For a short
time after his death, when anti-French feelings ran high,
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the charge was heard that his teachings were hostile to
government and therefore subversive. Apart from that
brief period, the prevailing attitude was overwhelmingly
favorable, with some of the most prominent men of the
time-Hume, Burke, Gibbon, Pitt, Lansdowne, Northproudly proclaiming themselves his disciples.
The ultimate accolade, the comparison of Smith with
Newton, 13 recalls the reception given to that other latterday Newton, Charles Darwin. Indeed, the Wealth of Nations and the Origin of Species had much in common: Both
were classics in their own time, and for some of the same
reasons. Each had been amply prepared for by the reputation of its author, by the importance he himself attached
to it and the many years he devoted to it, and by tantalizing previews in the form of conversations, letters, and lec-
tures. And each announced itself, by the boldness of its
thesis, its comprehensiveness, and its imposing title, as a
major intellectual event. Whatever questions might be
raised about its originality or validity, its importance and
influence are hardly in dispute. For good or ill, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations heralded the beginning of "political economy" as that term
was generally understood at the time-"classical economics" as a later generation was to know it.
The basic themes of the Wealth of Nations are too familiar to need elaboration: the division oflabor making for increased productivity and thus the increased "opulence" of
all of society; the fundamental facts of human natureself-interest (or "self-love") and the "propensity to truck,
barter, and exchange" -which were the generating force
of the economic process; the "invisible hand" (a metaphor
used only once but implied throughout) which made the
individual's interest an instrument for the general good;
and the "system of natural liberty" which was the only certain means to achieve both the wealth of nations and the
welfare of individuals.l 4 The argument was worked out in
great detail under such headings as money, trade, value,
labor, capital, rent.
One subject that did not appear in the chapter titles or
sub-heads was poverty. Yet this was as much a theme of
the book as wealth itself. Indeed, it may be argued that if
the Wealth of Nations was less than novel in its theories of
money, trade, or value, it was genuinely revolutionary in
its view of poverty and its attitude toward the poor.
It was not, however, revolutionary in the sense which is
often supposed: the demoralization of the economy resulting from the doctrine oflaissez faire, the demoralization of
man implied in the image of "economic man," and the de-
moralization of the poor who found themselves at the
mercy of forces over which they had no control-over
which, according to the new political economy, no one
had any cpntroJ.15 This is a common reading of the Wealth
of Nations, but not a just one. For it supposes that Smith's
idea of a market economy was devoid of moral purpose,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that his concept of human nature was mechanistic andreductivist, and that his attitude towards the poor was indifferent or callous. Above all it fails to take account of the
fact that Smith was a moral philosopher, by conviction as
well as profession. As the Professor of Moral Philosophy at
the University of Glasgow and the celebrated author of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he could hardly have
thought it his mission to preside over the dissolution of
moral philosophy.
Published in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments went
through four editions before the Wealth of Nations appeared, and another edition a few years later. Its three
French translations made Smith almost as well known
among the philosophes as Hume was. Today Smith's fame
rests so completely upon the Wealth of Nations one might
be tempted to dismiss the earlier work as just that, an early
work that was overshadowed and superseded by his later,
major work. In his own time, however, his reputation de-
rived at least as much from the earlier book, and this even
after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. (In the
Memoir of Smith written three years after his death, Dugald Steward devoted twenty-six pages, one-third of the
whole, to Moral Sentiments and only seventeen pages to
the Wealth of Nations.) Smith had always planned to revise
Moral Sentiments, and the last year of his life was devoted
entirely to that task. The new edition expanded upon, but
did not substantively alter, the thesis of the original. The
most important change was the addition of a chapter, the
title of which testifies to his abiding concern: "Of the Corruption of Our Moral Sentiments, Which is Occasioned by
this Disposition to Admire the Rich and the Great, and to Despise or Neglect Persons of Poor and Mean Condition." 16
A major theme of controversy among Smith scholars
has been Das Adam Smith-Problem, as a German commentator portentously labelled it-the question of the
congruence of Moral Sentiments with the Wealth of Nations.l7 About the doctrine of Moral Sentiments itself there
is little dispute. The operative word in that book was "sympathy." Sympathy was presumed to be as much a principle
of human nature as self-interest; indeed it informed selfinterest since it was one of the pleasures experienced by
the individual when he contemplated or contributed to
the good of another. "To feel much for others and little for
ourselves, ... to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human
nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their
whole grace and propriety." Smith distinguished his idea
of sympathy from Hutcheson's "moral sense," which was
so radically at variance with self-interest that it supposed
virtue to reside in the denial of one's interest and the defiance of one's nature. But Hutcheson's doctrine, Smith ar-
gued, at least had the merit of maintaining a distinction
between virtue and vice, in contrast to the "wholly pernicious," "licentious system" of Mandeville, which made no
such distinction and recognized no motive, no principle of
5
�conduct, other than self-interest.l 8* Unlike Mandeville or
Bentham, Smith was able to credit such sentiments and to
use unapologetically such words as sympathy, beneficence, virtue, humanity, love of others. There were occasions, he insisted, when the interests of the individual had
to make way for the interests of others, and this regardless
of any calculations of utility.
One individual must never prefer himself so much even to
any other individual, as to hurt or injure that other, in order to
in the charges of "impertinent jealousy/' "mean rapacity,"
umean and malignant expedients," "sneaking arts," "interesting sophistry," "interested falsehood."24 One of
Smith's main criticisms of the mercantile system was that
it encouraged merchants and manufacturers to be selfish
and duplicitous.
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of
the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby
lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They
benefit himself, though the benefit to the one should be
say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are
much greater than the hurt or injury to the other.20
silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains.
The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his
own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest
of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing,
too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty, of
which it is only a subordinate part. He should, therefore, be
equa1ly willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe.21
The argument of Moral Sentiments is subtle, complicated, and not without difficulties, but even the barest
statement of it is enough to demonstrate that Smith was
hardly the ruthless individualist or amoralist he is sometimes made out to be. Whatever difficulties there may be
in the reconciliation of Moral Sentiments with the Wealth
of Nations, it is clear enough that Smith intended both as
part of his grand "design", that he had the Wealth of Nations in mind even before he wrote Moral Sentiments, and
that he remained committed to Moral Sentiments, reissuing and revising it long after the Wealth of Nations was
published.22
A close reading of the Wealth of Nations itself suggests
that political economy as Smith understood it was part of a
larger moral philosophy, a new kind of moral economy.
Schumpeter complained that Smith was so steeped in the
tradition of moral philosophy derived from scholasticism
and natural law that he could not conceive of economics
per se, an economics divorced from ethics and politics.2l
The point is well taken, although not necessarily in criticism. The bias and the rhetoric of the moral philosopher
crop up again and again in the Wealth of Nations: in the
condemnation of the "vile maxim," "All for themselves
and nothing for other people"; in the proposition that the
trade of the nation should be conducted on the same principles that govern private affairs; in the denunciations of
manufacturers and merchants who were all too willing to
sacrifice the public interest for their private interests and
were prepared to use any strategem to achieve their ends;
7
*By the same token Smith would have rejected the kind of utilitarianism
espoused by Jeremy Bentham, who said that he could not conceive of a
human being "in whose instance any public interest he can have had, will
not, insofar as it depends upon himself, have been sacrificed to his own
personal interest." In fact, Bentham did conceive of one such human
being-himself, whom he once described as "the most philanthropic of the
philanthropic: philanthropy the end and instrument of his ambition." !9
6
They complain only of those of other people.
The clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers easily persuade them that the private interest of a part,
and of a subordinate part of the society, is the general interest
of the whole.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise
prices.
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce
which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to
with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after
having been long and carefully examined, not only with the
most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It
comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly
the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
It is the industry which is carried on for the benefit of the
rich and powerful, that is principally encouraged by our mercantile system. That which is carried on for the benefit of the
poor and the indigent, is too often, either neglected, or oppressed.25
These attacks on "private interests" that were in conflict with the "public interest," especially with the interests of the "poor and indigent," may seem difficult to reconcile with the famous dictum: "It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that
we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
interest." 26 But this principle of self-interest was predicated on certain conditions: that the butcher, brewer, and
baker not take unfair advantage of others, that they abide
by the rules of the free market, that they not "conspire,"
"deceive," and "oppress." Under these conditions self-interest was itself a moral principle-not as lofty as altruism,
but, in the mundane affairs of life (the provision of "dinner"), more reliable and effective.
Hovering over these individual interests, ensuring that
they work together for the greater good of the whole, the
Hpublic interest," was the benevolent, ubiquitous uinvisible hand." 27 The "invisible hand" has been much criticized. If only, it has been said, Smith had not introduced
that unfortunate metaphor with its teleological overtones,
if only he had confined himself to the austere language of
mechanics and nature, he would have avoided much misWINTER/SPRING 1983
�understanding. There is some justice in this complaint.
The invisible hand was indeed invisible; the genius of the
system of 11 naturalliberty" was that it required no 11 hand,"
no intervention, direction, or regulatiori to bring about the
general good. But the metaphor served the important purpose of keeping the reader mindful of the purpose of that
system. It was by means of the invisible hand that the individual was led "to promote an end which was no part of his
intention"; "by pursuing his own interest he frequently
promotes that of society more effectually than when he
really intends to promote it." zs Without that metaphor the
weight of the argument might have rested with the individual's interests. The invisible hand shifted the emphasis
to the public interest. If the metaphor was unfortunate, it
was not for the reason that it was teleological; on the contrary, its utility and justification lay in the fact that it
clearly expressed the teleological cast of the argument.
The general interest that emerged from Smith's system
was '1general" in the Rousseauan or Hegelian sense of a
general interest more elevated than the sum of individual
interests-Hegelian perhaps more than Rousseauan, the
"invisible hand" resembling Hegel's "cunning of reason"
which contrived to make the interests and passions of individuals serve a larger purpose of which the individuals
themselves were unaware.* It was also ~~general" in the pe-
destrian, utilitarian sense of the totality of interests of all
the members of society. This second sense pointed to the
importance of the "people" and the "poor" in Smith's theory. The "wealth of nations" of the title referred not to the
nation in the mercantilist sense-the nation-state whose
wealth was a measure of the power it could exercise vis-avis other states-but to the people comprising the nation.
And "people" not in the political sense of those having a
voice and active part in the political process, but in the
social and economic sense, those working and living in so-
ciety, of whom the largest part were the "lower ranks" or
"poor."
The concern with the people emerged early in the book
in the discussion of the division of labor, when it appeared
that the great advantage of that mode of production was
the "universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest
ranks of the people ... , a general plenty [which] diffuses
itself through all the different ranks of the society." 29 Addressing the ucommon complaint" that since luxuries had
become available to the poor they were no longer content
with the humble food, clothing, and lodging that had once
been their lot, Smith put the question: "Is this improve*There is no suggestion that the "cunning of reason," as it appeared in
Hegel's Philosophy of History, was inspired by Smith's "invisible hand."
But Hegel had read Smith (as well as other political economists, including
Say and Ricardo), and there are distinct echoes of Smith's "market place"
in the Philosophy of Right, especially in the concept of "civil society," the
realm intermediate between the individual and the state in which individuals pursue their private interests.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ment in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people
to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to
the society?" His answer was unequivocal.
Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make
up the far greater part of every great political society. But
what improves the circumstances of the greater part can
never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far
greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but
equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the
whole body of the people, should have such a share of the
produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well
fed, clothed and lodged30
The condition of the poor was decisive, Smith reasoned,
partly by sheer force of numbers; being the largest part of
society, their condition necessarily determined the condition of society as a whole. In part it was a matter of "equity"; as producers of the goods enjoyed by the rest of society, they were entitled to a fair share of those goods. They
also had a special claim to Smith's attention because they
were one of the two orders of society-laborers and landlords-whose interests were "connected with the general
interest of society," in contrast to the third, merchants and
manufacturers, whose interests were often at variance
with it.3I Yet the laborers were at the greatest disadvantage: as consumers they were ill-served by a mercantilist
system that promoted high prices and discouraged imports; and as producers by a system that permitted their
employers, by fair means or foul, to keep wages low and
prices high. The poor, in short, were the chief victims of
the existing system-and would be the chief beneficiaries
of the "natural" system proposed by Smith.
Smith's critique of mercantilism is generally read as an
attack on government regulation and a plea for laissez
faire. But it was much more than that, as contemporaries
were aware. Among other things it WRS a criticism of the
prevailing theory of wages. While Smith was not the first
to question the expediency or desirability of low wages, he
was the first to offer a systematic, comprehensive rationale
for high wages. The consensus at the time was that low
wages were both natural and economically necessary: natural because the poor would not work except out of dire
need, and necessary if the nation were to enjoy a favorable
balance of trade. This was the view of Hume, who explained that in years of scarcity when wages were low, "the
poor labour more, and really live better, than in years of
great plenty, when they indulge themselves in idleness
and riot."3Z Arthur Young put it more succinctly: "Every
one but an idiot knows, that the lower classes must be kept
poor, or they will never be industrious."33 Both admitted
that excessively low wages would provide no incentive to
work. "Two shillings and sixpence a day." Young remarked, "will undoubtedly tempt some to work, who
would not touch a tool for one shilling." 34 But this was an
argument for subsistence wages, not for high wages.
7
�It remained for Smith to defend high wages, the "liberal
reward of labour.''
The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation so it increases the industry of the common people. The
wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which,
like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the
encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases
the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope
of bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in
ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the
utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always
find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than
where they are low: in England, for example, than in Scotland; in the neighbourhood of great towns, than in remote
country places.35
Smith granted that some workers, if they earned enough
in four days to keep them for a week, would be tdle the
other days; but these were a minority. Most workers, he
was convinced, were given to the opposite failing: if they
were well paid by the piece they would so overwork them·
selves as to impair their health. It may have been with
Hume in mind (and out of courtesy to his friend that he
did not quote him to this effect) that Smith disputed the
conventional view. "That men in general should work bet·
ter when they are ill fed than when they are well fed, when
they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits,
when they are frequently sick than when they are gener·
ally in good health, seems not very probable." 36
The doctrine of high wages was a corollary of Smith's
conception of a uprogressive" economy. Since high wages
were the result of increasing wealth and at the same time
the cause of increasing population, only in an expanding
economy, where the demand for labor kept abreast of the
supply, could real wages remain high. "It is in the progres·
sive state, while the society is advancing to the further ac·
quisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of
the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and
the most comfortable." In a "stationary" state, on the
other hand, the condition of the poor was "dull" and
"hard," and in a a declining" state it was "miserable" and
"melancholy."l7 The division of labor was crucial for the
same reason, because it made for greater productivity and
thus for an expanding, progressive economy where in~
creased wealth could extend to the "lowest ranks of the
people." 38
The idea of a progressive economy places Smith in the
ranks of the "optimists." It may also be his chief claim to
originality. Unlike previous economists for whom one
good could be purchased only at the expense of anotherthe national interest at the expense of individual interests,
agriculture at the expense of industry, the power of the
nation at the expense of the liberty of its citizens, the pro·
8
ductivity of labor at the expense of the happiness of the
laborer-Smith envisioned an economy in which most
goods and interests were compatible and complementary.
Free trade would enhance both freedom and wealth; htgh
wages would ensure productivity and well-being; the self·
interest of the individual would promote, however unw1t·
tingly, the public interest. It was a prescription for a liber·
ating, expanding, prospering, progressive economy m
which all the legitimate values and interests of society sup·
ported and reenforced each other: liberty and prosperity,
the individual and society, industry and agnculture, capi·
tal and labor, wealth and well-being.
This optimistic view of the economy presupposed an
optimistic view of human nature. It is the French philo·
sophes who are usually credited with such a view. But theu
optimism, based upon the potentiality ~nd potency of rea·
son, was not a conspicuously democratic doctnne, at least
not at a time when the mass of the people were unedu·
cated and illiterate. Because reason was so precious, and
because the ordinary people were presumed to be not yet
capable of exercising the degree of reason required for a
truly rational order, most of the philosophes looked to en·
lightened rulers, "benevolent despots," to do for society
what the people could not do for themselves..
.
To Smith (and the Scottish Enlightenment m general) It
was not reason that defined human nature so much as m~
terests, passions, sentiments, sympathies. These were
qualities shared by all people, not in some remote future
but in the present. No enlightened despot was reqmred to
activate those interests, no Benthamite legislator to bring
about a harmony of interests. All that was necessary was to
free people-all people, in all ranks and callings-:--so that
they could act on their interests. From these md1~1dually
motivated freely inspired achons, the general mterest
would ern'erge without any intervention, regulation, or
coercion.
In a sense Smith's was a more modest-"lower," one
might say-view of human nature, and by that token a
more democratic one. If people differed, as they patently
did it was not because of any innate differences but be·
ca~se the qualities common to all had been developed in
them in different degrees. On the nature-nurture tssue, as
we now know it, Smith was unequivocally on the nurture
side.
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the. very different
genius which appears to disting~ish !llen of different professions when grown up to matunty, IS not upon many occasions' so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters,
between a philosopher and a common street porter, for exa~
ple, seems to ~rise not so much from natu:e, as fro~ hab~t,
custom, and education . ... By nature a philosopher IS not m
genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as
a mastiff is from a greyhound. 39
WINTER/ SPRING 1983
�The idea that differences were less the "cause" than the
"effect" of the division of labor radically differentiates
Smith from other philosophers-Plato, most notablywho had used the concept of the division of labor. While
some of Smith's illustrations and "stages of historyn were
reminiscent of Plato, the heart of his thesis could not have
been more dissimilar. Indeed, given Smith's respect for
classical philosophy, and for Plato especially, one may take
his spirited denial of any difference in "nature" between
the philosopher and the street porter as an implicit rebuke
to Plato. To Plato natural differences were precisely the
"cause" rather than the "effect" of the division of labor:
the division of labor reflected the innate differences
among people, and permitted people of essentially different natures to cooperate for the common good. The only
innate quality mentioned by Smith, and the only one necessary to his system, was the jjpropensity to truck, barter,
and exchange." 40 This propensity was shared by porter
and philosopher alike; it was the common denominator
that made it possible for everyone to participate in the division of labor and for everyone to profit from that division. It was also the common denominator that united the
highest and lowest ranks in a single human species, a species in which the varieties were not half so different as
mastiff and greyhound.
Just as the differences among individuals were functional rather than organic, so the differences among the
orders of society were functional rather than hierarchic.
Those three orders were defined by the nature of their income-rent, wages, and profits-not by their position in a
hierarchy-upper, middle, and lower. In fact wage-earners, or laborers, constituted the "second order." 41 Else~
where Smith did use the terms current at the time, "lower
ranks" or "lower classes," to describe the laborers. What
was important about them, however, was not that they
were of the lower classes but that they received their income in the form of wages rather than rent or profit. In
this respect the laborer was a partner in the economic enterprise, the most important partner, Smith sometimes
gave the impression, since it was his labor that was the
source of value. And labor, like rent and profit, was a "patrimony," a form of property entitled to the same consideration as any other kind of property.
The patrimony which every man has in his own labour, as it
is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the
most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies
in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him
from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner
he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour is a plain
violation of this most sacred property.42
There was, however, one point at which this optimistic
vision failed Smith, failed him so seriously, in the opinion
of some recent commentators, as to make him a prophet of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
doom, a critic of capitalism on the order of Marx-indeed
a precursor of Marx in exposing that fatal flaw of capitalism, the "alienation" of the working class.43
If Smith did anticipate something like Marx's theory of
alienation, as Marx himself intimated, it must also be said
that he avoided the ambiguity that appeared in Marx's
own discussion of that subject as well as in recent Marxist
thought.44 For Smith clearly located the source of alienation (if it may be called that) not in capitalism as such but
in industrialism, and more specifically in the division oflabor that was the peculiar character and the special
strength of modern industry. The poignancy of Smith's argument comes from the paradox that the division oflabor,
which provided the momentum for the progressive economy that was the only hope for the laboring classes, was
also the probable cause of the mental, spiritual, even physical deterioration of those classes.
In the progress of the division oflabour, the employment of
the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is of the
great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very
simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by
their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is
spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the ef-
fects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the
same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the
habit of such exertions, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The
torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any general, noble, or tender sentiments, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even
of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his
country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally
corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with
abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a
soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders
him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has
been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in
this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual,
social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor,
that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. 45
This passage is sufficiently powerful in itself, and sufficiently problematic in the context of Smith's work, to
stand on its own without being assimilated to the Marxist
idea of alienation and without taking on all the difficulties
associated with that idea. There were, one might argue,
two different Marxist ideas: that of the "early Marx,"
where alienation arose in the earliest stages of society as a
9
�result of the separation from physical nature and the division of labor in the family; and that of the "mature Marx,"
where it was attributed to the worker's divorce from the
ownership of the means of production and from the products of his own labour. Neither of these ideas corresponds
to Smith's. For Smith the question of ownership was as
irrelevant as the question of nature or the family. His only
concern was the debilitating effect of the division of labor
in the industrial process. In this respect the factory worker
in a socialist regime~ or in any other form of cooperative or
public enterprise, would suffer just as grievously as the factory worker under capitalism.
That Smith held industrialism rather than capitalism at
fault is apparent from the only other passage in the Wealth
ofNations bearing upon this subject. Here Smith compared
the industrial worker with the agricultural laborer, to the
disadvantage of the former. Husbandry, he argued, required a greater degree of knowledge and experience, judgment and discretion than most industrial trades. The ordi.
nary ploughman might be deficient in the arts of "social
intercourse," his voice and language uncouth by the standards of the townsman, but his "understanding," sharpened by the variety of tasks which he had to perform, was
superior to the mechanic occupied with one or two simple
operations. "How much," Smith concluded,
14
the lower
ranks of people in the country are really superior to those of
the town, is well known to every man whom either business
or curiosity has led to converse much with both."46
If the problem was not alienation in the Marxist sense, it
was in its own terms serious enough, serious not only for
Smith himself, who wrote of it with great passion, but for
the reader who may find it a grave flaw in the argument of
the Wealth of Nations. How can one reconcile this dismal
portrait of the industrial worker reduced to a state of tor-
These discordant images are not reconcilable. What can
be said, however, is that the dominant image, that which
informs by far the largest part of the book and which bears
the largest weight of the argument, is the "optimistic"
one: the image of an active, intelligent, industrious worker,
receiving good wages, constantly bettering himself, and
sharing in the ~~universal opulence" created by the division
of labor and the expansion of industry. It was this scenario
that impressed itself on Smith's readers in his own time
and for generations afterwards. Although Marx, in Capital,
quoted the passage describing the worker stupefied by the
division oflabor, it was not until the "early Marx" and the
idea of alienation came into fashion after World War II
that this passage became the subject of serious attention
and that the vision of
~~another"
Smith, a "pessimistic"
Smith began to emerge.*
It is also important to recall the context in which Smith
praised the farm laborer at the expense of the industrial
worker. The first passage appeared in the midst of his denunciation of the scheming merchants and manufacturers
who "seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against
the public." It was then that Smith put in a good word for
the agricultural classes-laborers as well as farmers-who
were not in the habit of conspiring together and who deserved to be defended against those "very contemptible
authors" who spoke of them so contemptuously.5 2 The
second passage appeared towards the end of the work in a
discussion of the functions of government. Of all these
functions-defense, justice, public works, the support of
the sovereign-the subject to which Smith devoted far the
most space was education. After a lengthy account of the
por, stupidity, and ignorance, lacking in judgment, initiative, courage, or any "intellectual, social, and martial vir-
tues" -all this because of the division oflabor-with the
earlier image of the "hearty," "cheerful" worker who, as a
result of the same division of labor, received a "plentiful
subsistence," enjoyed "bodily strength," was "active, dili-
gent, and expeditious," and looked forward to the "comfortable hope of bettering his condition" and ending his
days in ease and plenty"?47 How can one reconcile the
favorable view of the agricultural laborer, who acquired
"judgment and discretion" because he had to deal with so
many different tasks, with an earlier image of the same laborer who, precisely because he went from one activity to
another, developed the habit of "sauntering," became "in11
dolent," "careless," "slouthful and lazy," incapable of any
vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions"? In that earlier passage Smith contrasted the dilatory farm laborer to the factory boy whose task was the
opening and shutting of a valve, and who was inspired, by
boredom itself, to invent a labor-saving device which was
"one of the greatest improvements" made on the steamengine.48
10
*The two Smiths appear most dramatically in the work of Robert
Heilbroner. His influential history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers (1953), presented the conventional optimistic Smith. His recent
work introduces a "deeply pessimistic" Smith, this based not only on the
so-called "alienation" passage, which Heilbroner now emphasizes to the
point where it seems to dominate the Wealth of Nations, but on a reinterpretation of Smith's economic theory. So far from positing a "progressive," expanding economy, Smith is seen as predicting decline and decay:
"material decline awaiting at the terminus of the economic journey,
moral decay suffered by society in the course of its journeying."49 This
argument depends on ascribing to Smith something like a Malthusian
theory, in which higher wages lead to an increase of population, an eventual decline of wages, and thus a stagnant and "stationary" economy. But
Smith had anticipated this argument and had refuted it, at least for the
foreseeable future. So long, he reasoned, as the division of labor continued (the division of labor serving as a metaphor for the process of mechanization and invention), the economy would be able to absorb the higher
wages and remain in a progressive, expanding state.50
When John Stuart Mill, almost three-quarters of a century later, argued
for the desirability as well as the inevitability of a "stationary state," it was
under the influence of Malthus and Ricardo rather than Smith, and on
moral and esthetic as well as economic grounds. Finding competitiveness
and material acquisitiveness disagreeable, he preferred a society in
which, "while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer."51
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�history of educational institutions, he posed the question
of the state's role in education. Should, the "public" -the
Hstate, 11 in the marginal notes-pay attention to the
"edu~
cation of the people," and if so, how should this be done
for the "different orders of the people"? It was at this
point that Smith inserted the dramatic warning about the
dire effects of the division of labor. And it was to forestall
those effects, to prevent the "corruption and degeneracy"
of the laboring people, that he then went on to develop an
elaborate scheme of public education.53
The proposal was simple and bold. The "common peo·
pie," including those "bred to the lowest occupation,"
were to be required to master the essential ingredients of
education-reading, writing, and arithmetic. To this end
the state was to establish a school in every district, charg·
ing a fee so modest that even the common laborer could
afford it, the major cost being borne by the government.
Although the schools themselves would not be compul·
sory, some form of schooling would be. To enforce this
provision, Smith suggested that an examination in the
"three R' s" be required before anyone could enter a guild
or set up in a trade. 54
In one sense the proposal was not remarkable. Smith
was simply drawing upon the experience of Scotland
where the parish schools had taught, as he said, "almost
the whole common people" to read and a great proportion
of them to write and reckon.55 In another sense, however,
it was extraordinary, not only because he proposed to ex·
tend to England a state system of education that had never
existed there and that was bound to incur (as it did even a
century later) a great deal of hostility, but because it went
against the grain of his own doctrine. Having spent the bet·
ter part of two volumes arguing against government regula·
tion, he now advanced a scheme requiring a greater mea~
sure of government involvement than anything that had
ever existed before. In the same chapter in which
he made this proposal he criticized the principle of en·
dowments for schools and colleges on the ground that
they gave the institutions an assured income and relieved
them from the necessity of proving their merit; for the
same reason he opposed salaries for university teachers,
preferring fees paid by individual students to individual in·
structors. Yet here, for the "common people," he urged
the establishment of a state-administered, state-supported,
state-enforced system of education with only token fees to
be paid by the parents-enough to give them a stake in the
education of their children but not enough to cover the
cost of education. Perhaps it was to justify this large depar·
ture from his general principle that he painted so dramatic
a picture of the industrial worker whose degeneracy could
only be arrested by a compulsory system of education.
Having made out so strong a case for public education,
Smith went on to extol the virtues of education as such.
"A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties
of a man, is, if possible, more contemptible than even a
coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
more essential part of the character of human nature."
Even if the state were to derive no practical benefit from
the education of the lower orders, that education would
still warrant its active concern. In fact the state would ben·
efit from it indirectly: a better instructed people were less
inclined to the disorders that came from "delusions of en·
thusiasm and superstition"; they were more likely to be
"decent and orderly"; feeling "respectable" themselves,
they would be respected by others and be respectful of
others; they would not be easily taken in by "faction and
sedition"; and in a free country, where it was important
that the government have the "favourable judgment" of
the people, it was also important that the people should
not judge the government "rashly or capriciously."56
One commentator has described this view of education
as an "unformulated theory of 'social contro\."'57 If this is
so, any idea of education which is more than purely vocational, which attributes to it any effect on character, sensibility, intelligence, and behavior, falls under the same re·
proach. Moreover, any alternative would be similarly suspect. What kind of education could Smith have pro·
posed which would not have been an instrument of social
control? Had he taken the obvious laissez faire position of
denying to the state any role in education (as his contemporary Frederick Eden, for example, did) would this not
have exposed him to the charge of being unconcerned
with the plight of the lower classes, unwilling to exert himself (and the state) in an effort to improve their condition,
perhaps deliberately keeping them in a state of ignorance
so that they would remain docile and subservient? Or if he
had recommended the kind of education Hannah More favored, reading, but not writing or arithmetic, on the assumption that reading alone was necessary to inculcate
the precepts of religion and the "habits of industry and virtue," was this, too, not an obvious exercise of social con·
troJ?58 And all the voluntary schools of the time-charity
schools, Sunday schools, night schools, industry schools,
schools connected with workhouses and poorhouseswhich provided the rudiments of literacy for large numbers of people who would otherwise have been totally illit·
erate, were these reprehensible for the same reason, or
were they in any way preferable to Smith's plan?
It might be said that it is not Smith's proposal for a comprehensive, state-supported system of education that is
suspect, but the specific moral purpose he attached to it,
this being all the more ominous in view of the role of the
state. Or perhaps the objection is not so much to the exercise of "social control" as to the violation of the "indigenous" culture of the poor, the imposition upon them of
alien "middle-class values." Again, this is to ignore the contemporary context. Smith was not arguing against latter·
day romantics who idealize illiteracy as part of a natural,
superior, folk culture. He was arguing, at least implicitly,
against those of his contemporaries who denied to the
poor the capacity and opportunity to achieve those "middle-class values," who thought that no amount of educa-
11
�tion could civilize, socialize, and moralize them, or who
worried that an educated populace would be restless, demanding, discontent. When Smith urged that the poor be
educated so that they would become better citizens, better
workers, and better human beings, he was not demeaning
the poor but crediting them with the virtues ("values," in
modern parlance) he himself held in such high esteem.
In a brilliant commentary on Smith, Joseph Cropsey has
argued that the dual purpose of his political economy was
to make freedom possible and to make of freedom a form
of virtue. 59 This was also, one might say, the purpose of his
system of education. Just as the laborer, by dint of his labor, was to be a free and full participant in the economy, so
by dint of his education, he was to be a free and full participant in society. For Smith freedom was itself a virtue and
the precondition of all other virtues. It was this cardinal
virtue that he wanted to make available to the "common
people," even to those "bred to the lowest occupation."
If Smith's political economy was not the amoral, asocial
doctrine it has sometimes been made out to be, neither
was it as dogmatically, rigorously laissez faire as had been
thought. 60 His plan of education was only one of several
instances in which he departed from the strict construction of laissez faire, and not unwittingly but deliberately.
He did so when he proposed a law to limit the freedom of
bankers to issue notes, and when he advocated retaining
the law against usury. He also did so when he implicitly
sanctioned the poor laws.
Smith's position on the poor laws has been generally ignored or misunderstood. Because he was so forthright in
criticizing the Act of Settlement of 1662, it is sometimes
assumed that he was also opposed to the poor laws.61 It is
significant, however, that while he did attack the Settlement Act (and the Statute of Apprentices as well), he did
not attack the poor laws. Moreover, his criticism of the
Settlement Act had nothing to do with the giving of relief
but only with limiting the mobility of labor and violating
the liberty of the poor.
To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour
from the parish where he chooses to reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice . ... There is scarce a poor
man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say, who
has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this i1l-contrived law of settlements.62
This passage was much quoted (and disputed) at the time,
and Smith was credited with helping bring about the reform of the laws of settlement in 1795. What Smith conspicuously did not do was to challenge the poor law itself,
the obligation to provide relief for those who could not
provide for themselves. Nor was he one of those who, in
the years following the publication of the Wealth of Nations, expressed anxiety about the mounting costs of relief.
He died before the movement to restrict relief reached its
12
peak, but not before Joseph Townsend and others had
raised the alarm and urged the drastic reform, if not the
abolition, of the poor laws.
On the subject of taxation Smith exhibited the same
pragmatic, humane temper and the same concern for the
poor. His first principle was that taxes be levied "in proportion" to the ability to pay; and the corollary was that they
be levied only on "luxuries" rather than "necessaries." He
went on to define ~~necessaries" as "not only the commodi-
ties which are indispensably necessary for the support of
life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to
be without" -linen shirts and leather shoes, for example.
In the same spirit he recommended that highway tolls on
"carriages of luxury" (coaches, postchaises) should be
higher than on "carriages of necessary use" (carts, wagons), so that "the indolence and vanity of the rich is made
to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the
poor."63 Today, when it is taken for granted that necessity
and luxury are relative terms, Smith's ideas on the subject
may seem unremarkable. In his own time, when many of
his contemporaries were bitterly complaining about the
"luxuries of the poor," and when the low-wage theorists
were using the evidence of such luxuries-and precisely
linen shirts and leather shoes-as an argument against
higher wages, Smith's views were notably progressive.
So, too, were his views on mercantilisin. Among his
other objections to mercantilist regulations was the fact
that they were generally in the interests of the merchants
and manufacturers and against the interests of the workers. Indeed on the few occasions when they were otherwise, he favored retaining them, even at the expense of
the principle of free trade.
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are
always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is
sometimes otherwise when it is in favour of the masters.64
Thus he disapproved of the regulation of wages-which
established not a minimum but a maximum rate of
wages-and supported the law requiring employers to pay
their workers in money rather than in goods. "This law
(payment in money] is in favour of the workmen; but the
8th of George [the fixing of wages] is in favour of the masters." For the same reasons he protested against the injustice of permitting masters to combine while forbidding
workers to do so. 65
More important than the effect of this or that policy on
the poor was the image of the poor implicit in these policies. These were the "creditable people, even of the lowest
order" who deserved more than the bare necessities of life,
the '(sober and industrious poor" who were the proper
beneficiaries of a proportionate system of taxation, the
"lowest ranks of the people" who would become more, not
less, industrious as a result of high wages and who would
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�benefit, morally and materially, from a progressive economy. That Smith, like most of his countrymen, thought it
just to devise policies that would favor the "sober and industrious poor" rather than the "dissolute and disorderly"
is not surprising. What is more interesting is his confident
assumption that the overwhelming number of the poor
were sober and industrious. It was this assumption that
permitted him to "connect" the interests of the "labouring poor" with the "general interest" of society. And not
only their interests but their natures. It was because the
poor were presumed to have the same virtues and passions
as everyone else, because there were no innate differences
separating them from the other classes, that they were capable of working within the "system of natural liberty"
and profiting from it as much as everyone else. These
"creditable" poor were capable and desirous of bettering
themselves, capable and desirous of exercising the virtues
inherent in human nature, capable and desirous of the liberty that was their right as responsible individuals.66
This is not the doctrine cynically described by Anatole
France: "The law is equal for all; rich and poor alike are
free to sleep under a bridge." Smith did not pretend that
the "formal" equality of the law, even the "natural" equality of the laws of political economy, could be applied to all
indiscriminately. This is why he devised a state system of
education specifically intended for the poor, why he proposed the kinds of taxes he did, why he did not object to
poor relief, why he supported regulations favoring workers, why he based his system on a policy of high wages and
an expanding economy. He did not shrink from the facts
of inequality or deny the need for correctives and palliatives. But neither did he retreat from his basic assumption:
that the poor, as much as the rich, were free, responsible,
moral agents. Later, this ideal of moral responsibility was
to be turned against the poor, used to justify the denial of
poor relief and the opposition to such protective ("paternalistic," as was said pejoratively) measures as factory acts.
To Smith the idea of moral responsibility had quite the
opposite function: to establish the claim of the poor to
higher wages, a higher standard of living, a higher rank in
life-to whatever goods might accrue to them as a result of
a free, expanding economy.
Between the old "moral economy" and Smith's political
economy there was a gulf-a chasm, some would say. The
former depended, at least in principle, on a system of regulations derived from equity, tradition, and law, a system
prescribing fair prices, just wages, customary rights, corporative rules, paternalistic obligations, hierarchical relationships-all of which were intended to produce a structured,
harmonious, stable, secure, organic order. By contrast, the
"system of natural liberty" prided itself on being open,
mobile, changeable, individualistic, with all the risks but
also all the opportunities associated with freedom. The
contrast is to a certain extent artificial, the old moral economy having been much attenuated in the century before
Smith, and the new political economy having its own
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
moral imperatives and constraints. For Smith political
economy was not an end in itself but a means to an end,
that end being the wealth and well-being, moral and material, of the "people," of whom the "laboring poor" were
the largest part. And the poor themselves had a moral status in that economy-not the special moral status they enjoyed in a fixed, hierarchic order, but that which adhered
to them as individuals in a free society sharing a common
human, which is to say, moral, nature.
1. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of
Great Britain (1876), in Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London 1907, XXVIII, 516,764.
2. On the early history of the expression "laissez faire," see Dugald
Stewart, Biogrdbhical Memoir of Adam Smith, New York 1966 (1st ed.,
1793), 93, n.1; August Oncken, Die Maxime Laissez-faire et laissez-passer,
Bern 1886; Edward R. Kittrell," 'Laissez Faire' in English Classical Economics," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1966, 610-20; Guy Routh, The
Origin of Economic Ideas, New York 1977,44-45.
.
3. Vernard Foley, "The Division of Labor in Plato and Smith," History of
Political Economy, 1974,242. In his edition of the Wealth of Nations London 1904, Edwin Cannan cited Mandeville as the source of the expression (3). But the passage quoted does not contain that phrase, and the
illustration was watch-making rather than pin-making. In this general
sense dozens of other writers might be credited with it.
4. Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan
Forbes, Edinbmgh 1966 (1st ed., 1767), 181.
5. Stewart, 68. In Smith's first year at Glasgow, 1751-52, he was Professor of Logic. His lectures on moral philosophy started in 1752 when he
was transferred to that chair.
6. Walter Bagehot, "Adam Smith as a Person" (1876), Collected Works,
Camb., Mass. 1968, III, 93.
7, Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody
Schumpeter, New York 1974 (Is! ed., 1954),184-86.
8. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England,
London 1884 (delivered as lectures in 1881). G. N. Clark traces the association of "industrial" and "revolution" to the early 1800s in France and
the phrase itself to the French economist Jer6me-Adolphe Blanqui (not
to be confused with the revolutionist Louis-August Blanqu~ in 1838,
Friedrich Engels in 1845 (Condition of the Working Class in England),
and John Stuart Mill in 1848 (Principles of Political Economy). But it was
Toynbee's work that popularized both the term and the idea. (Clark, The
Idea of the Industrial Revolution, Glasgow 1953).
9. The best summary of this debate is C. P. Kindleberger, "The Historical Background: Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution," in The Market and the State: Essays in Honor of Adam Smith, ed. Thomas Wilson
and AndrewS. Skinner, Oxf. 1976, 1-25. See the comments on this paper
by Asa Briggs (25-33) and R. M. Hartwell (33-41).
10. Stewart, 52.
II. John Rae, Life of Adam Smith, London 1895, 286.
12. Jacob H. Hollander, "The Founder of a School," in Adam Smith,
1776-1926: Lectures to Commemorate the Sesquicentennial of the Publication of"The Wealth ofNations", New York 1966 (1st ed., 1928), 25; Rae,
Life, 288-90.
13. John Millar in 1786, quoted by Asa Briggs in The Market and the
State, 28.
14. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, New York 1937, 11-14, 423, 651. The "invisible hand" metaphor also appears in a different context in the Theory of
Moral Sentiments, 7th ed., London 1792 (lst ed., 1759), I, 464.
15. One of the most effective statements of this view is Karl Polanyi, The
Great Transformation, Boston 1957 (lst ed., 1944). A more sophisticated
version has been advanced by E. P. Thompson, who describes the Wealth
of Nations as an "anti-model" rather than a new model, the negation of
the older paternalist model. The new political economy, he argues, was
13
�"disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives" not because Smith and his
colleagues were immoral or unconcerned with the public good, but objectively, regardless of their moral intentions. ("The Moral Economy of
the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, 1971,
89-90.)
16. Moral Sentiments, I, 146 ff.
17. August Oncken, "Das Adam Smith-Problem," Zeitschrift- fUr So-
zialwissenschaft, 1898. For recent statements and reevaluations of this
problem, see Ralph Anspach, "The Implications of the Theory of Moral
Sentiments for Adam Smith's Economic Thought," History of Political
Economy, 1972; Joseph Cropsey, "Adam Smith and Political Philosophy," in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas
Wilson, Oxf. 1975; D. D. Raphael, "The Impartial Spectator," ibid.;
Thomas Wilson, "Sympathy and Self·Interest," in The Market and the
State; Joseph Cropsey, "The Invisible Hand: Moral and Political Considerations," in Adam Smith and Modem Political Economy, ed. Gerald P.
O'Driscoll, Jr., Ames, Iowa 1979; Richard Teichgraeber III, "Rethinking
Das Adam Smith Problem," Journal of British Studies, 1981.
18. Moral Sentiments. l, 47; ll, 300, 305.
19. Jeremy Bentham, The Handbook of Political Fallacies, ed. Harold A.
Larrabee, New York 1962 (1sted.,l824), p. 230; Works, ed. John Bowring,
London 1838-43, XI, 72.
20. Moral Sentiments, I, 339.
21. Sentiments, II, 115.
22. The "design," as Smith described it in the seventh edition of Moral
Sentiments, included his moral philosophy, political economy, and theory of jurisprudence. (I, vi-vii.)
23. Schumpeter. !41, 182, 185.
24. Wealth of Nations. 388-89. 424, 460, 463, 577.
25. Wealth, 98, 128, 250, 609.
26. Wealth, 14.
27. Wealth, 423.
28. Wealth, 423.
29. Wealth, !!.
30. Wealth, 78-79.
3!. Wealth, 248.
32. A. W. Coats, "Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth
Century," Economic History Review, 1958, 39 (quoting Hume's Political
Discourses of 1752).
33. Arthur Young, The Farmer's Tour through the East of England, Lon·
don l77l,IV, 36!.
34. Young, A Six Month's Tour through the North of England, London
!770, I, 196.
35. Wealth, 8!.
36. Wealth, 82-83.
37. Wealth, 8!.
38. Wealth, ll.
39. Wealth, 15-16.
40. Wealth, !3.
4!. Wealth, 248-49.
42. Wealth, !2!-22.
43. For differing views of this subject, see Nathan Rosenberg, "Adam
Smith on the Division of Labor: Two Views or One?" Economica, 1965;
E. G. West, "The Political Economy of Alienation: Karl Marx and Adam
Smith," OxfordEcon~mic Papers, 1969; Robert L. Heilbroner, "The Paradox of Progress: Decline a'nd Decay in the Wealth of Nations," Journal of
the History ofldeas,1973 (i:eprinted in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew
S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson, Oxf. 1975); Robert Lamb, "Adam
Smith's Concept of Alienation," Oxford Economic Papers, 1973; E. G.
14
West, "Adam Smith and Alienation: A Rejoinder," ibid., 1975.
44. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick
Engels, rev. Ernest Untermann, New York 1936, 397-98.
45. Wealth, 734.
46. Wealth, 126-27
47. Wealth, 8!.
48. Wealth, 8-9.
49. Heilbroner, "The Paradox of Progress," Journal of the History of
Ideas, 1973, 243.
50. Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic
Revision, Camb.1978, 143-44.
51. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed.J. M. Robson, Toronto 1965,
II, 754.
52. Wealth,
53. Wealth,
54. Wealth.
55. Wealth.
56. Wealth,
126-28.
734.
736-38.
737.
740.
57. Mark Blaug, "The Economics of Education in English Classical Po·
litical Economy: A Re-Examination," in Essays on Adam Smith, 572.
Blaug does not, however, attach to "social control" the usual invidious
implications.
58. M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth
Century Puritanism in Action, Camb. 1938, 159.
59. Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Princi·
pies of Adam Smith, The Hague 1957; Cropsey, "Adam Smith," in His·
tory of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, Chicago
1963. See also essays cited in footnote 17.
60. The modification of the laissez-faire stereotype goes back at least to
Jacob Viner, "Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire," Journal of Political Economy, 1927. Among the more notable contributions to this revisionist interpretation are: Lionel Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy, London 1952; L. R. Sorenson, "Some
Classical Economists, Laissez Faire, and the Factory Acts," Journal
of Economic History, 1952; S. G. Checkland, "The Prescriptions of the
Classical Economists," Economica, 1953; A. W. Coats, "Economic
Thought and Poor Law Policy in the Eighteenth Century," Economic
History Review; Coats, "The Classical Economists and the Labourer," in
Land, Labour and Population, ed. E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay, London
1967; Coats (ed.), The Classical Economists and Economic Policy, London
1971; Thomas Sowell, Classical Economists Reconsidered, Princeton
1974; Nathan Rosenberg, "Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire Revisited," in
Adam Smith and Modern Political Economy.
61. E.g., Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, Homewood, Ill.
1968 (1st ed., 1962), p. 51. Blaug's claim that Smith condemned the "Poor
Laws in general'' may rest on Smith's criticisms of trade corporations and
assemblies, in the course of which he also criticized those regulations
which made such assemblies necessary-the regulation, for example,
"which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to pro·
vide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, [which] by giv·
ing them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies nee·
essary." (Wealth of Nations, 129). But the poor rates were levied by the
parish rather than by trades, and therefore did not come under Smith's
stricture.
62. Wealth, !4!.
63. Wealth, 777. 821. 683.
64. Wealth, !42.
65. Wealth. !42. 66-67.
66. Wealth. 823, 248, 740.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�A.mbiguities in Kant's Treatment of Space
Arthur Collins
One of the sources of persistent obscurity in the philosophy of Kant is the fact that he introduces a double standard for dealing with questions about what there is. In the
Critique of Pure Reason, this appears first in the culminating assertion of the Transcendental Aesthetic: the assertion ofthe "empirical reality and transcendental ideality of
space and time." To say that space and time are empiri~
cally real means that the things that figure in our experience are spatia-temporal things. These are the things
found in the common-sense world of perception and the
things that make up the subject matter of all scientific investigation. All of these empirical realities exist in space
and time. But, to say that space and time are transcendentally ideal means that they do not characterize things as
they are in themselves, as opposed to things as they appear
in our experience. Things apart from our experience and
independent of our mental activities are not spatia-temporal things. Vis-a-vis things as they are in themselves, space
and time are not anything real at all. They are merely ideas.
In the realm of things as they are nothing corresponds to
our ideas of space and time and these realities do not exist
in space and time. "It is solely from the human standpoint
that we can speak of space, of extended things, etc." (A 26,
B 42). Time, " ... in itself, apart from the subject, is nothing" (A 35, B 51).
One may suspect atl:he outset that the device that Kant
introduces here for treating questions about what there is
may be too powerful for any legitimate use. It looks as
though Kant avails himself of a means for having it both
A frequent contributor on the history of philosophy, Arthur Collins
teaches philosophy at the City University of New York. His last discussion of Kant, "Kant's Empiricism," appeared in the July 1979 issue of the
St. John's Review.
Quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason are from the translation of
Norman Kemp Smith; those from Kant's "Inaugural Dissertation" are
from the translation of G. B. Kerferd.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ways at crucial junctures. Faced with the destructive
claims of sceptics and idealists, Kant is a staunch realist.
The objects of perception are real things. They constitute
a causally connected, spatia-temporal system of material
objects which Kant calls "nature" and our knowledge of
these objects is objective knowledge. When he is pursuing
this realism, Kant likes to label entities envisioned by others that fall outside the sphere of possible experience mere
''Hirngespinsf' and uGedankendingen." But when Kant's
thoughts of human morality and freedom seem to be
threatened by this all-too-causal empirical reality, he is prepared to downgrade it, to emphasize that these empirical
0bjects" are only appearances, to reprimand "stubborn
insistence" on their reality (A 537, B 565), and to rest his
conception of man and the human situation on a further reality that underlies and is more fundamental than
appearance.
As a parallel for "the empirical world" of things we can
perceive and study scientifically, Kant uses the expression
"the intelligible world" for the realm of things in themselves. But in the Critique and all later works Kant consistently asserts that we cannot know anything whatever
about the intelligible world-an odd sort of intelligibility!
Before the Critique, in his Inaugural Dissertation, for example, Kant accepted a traditional concept of an intelligible world as opposed to a world of perception and he believed, in the spirit of Plato and the rationalists, that we
could have knowledge of nonsensible reality. In his mature
writing Kant repudiated the claim to know the nonsensible while retaining the designation "intelligible," although
it is only fitting in the context of the earlier view. The single surviving theme from his earlier position is Kant's occasional speculative suggestion that a creature whose intuition (mode of receptivity) is nonsensible might actually
know things in themselves and that God may know things
in themselves without anything like sense experience.
11
15
�Two kinds of reality: empirical and transcendental, risk
generating two systems of truths, one for each reality. Our
complete and permanent ignorance of things in them·
selves, in Kant's thinking, conveniently avoids the possibil·
ity of conflict between these two systems of truths. The
unknowability of transcendental reality "makes room for
faith" in Kant's own words. But in this connection, too,
the duality of the empirical and the transcendental, or
knowable and unknowable reality, seems too convenient
to be legitimate. An unfriendly critic can read Kant's doc·
trine as an admission that the faith that defends "God,
Freedom, and Immortality," operates only by relegating
them to a region where nothing can tend against them
since nothing can be known at all. At the same time, the
seeming robustness of empirical realism also relies on the
utter unknowability of things in themselves in the sense
that, if we could know anything at all about things in them·
selves, we would immediately recognize their ontological
primacy and the derivative and figmentary status of appearances. The veil of appearances seems to be more than
that in Kant's system, one might argue, only because it is
all that we can know.
Should we reject the dual standard of reality, the merely
empirical reality of objects of experience, and the unknowability of things as they are apart from how they appear to
us? Or is there some fundamental truth in Kant's realism
which is not hopelessly undercut by his transcendental
idealism? These questions go to the heart of Kant's system. In trying to answer them, we will find that the concept of space plays a particularly prominent role.
1 Outer Sense and Idealism
Kant's efforts to distinguish his views from the ideas of
earlier thinkers such as Descartes or Hume bring his conception of outer sense to the fore. Kant often relies entirely on the fact that he endorses both inner and outer
receptivity, while the "problematic and dogmatic idealists," as he classifies them, accept inner receptivity but not
outer. In the beginning of the Aesthetic, he defines outer
intuition or outer sense as a capacity "to represent to our~
selves objects as outside us and all without exception in
space" (A 22, B 37). In contrast, in inner intuition, the
mind "intuits itself or its inner state" (A 23, B 37). Here
Kant quite plainly thinks that "outside us," where we locate what is available to outer sense, means outside the
mind, where located things will not be mental things. Inner sense, just as plainly, has only mental things like
thoughts and ideas for its objects.
Kant thinks that the Cartesian ordering of these matters, inherited by the empiricists, involves a reduction of
receptivity to inner sense alone.
They have no expectaton of being able to prove apodeictically the absolute reality of space; for they are confronted by
16
idealism, which teaches that the reality of outer objects does
not allow of strict proof. On the other hand, the reality of the
object of our inner sense (the reality of myself and my state)
is, [they argue,] immediately evident through consciousness.
[A 38, B 55]
Kant goes on to say that the Cartesian-empiricist fails to
note that the object of outer sense in space is just as accessible to us as the object of inner sense.
In his interpretation of the tradition preceding him, Kant
is surely right. For Descartes, spatial reality, the realm of
extended substance, contrasts at the most fundamental
level possible with the realm of mental things. Extension
does not think and the mind is not extended. To this distinction Descartes very definitely adds the view that spatial reality is never given. It is not, as Kant would put it, intuited. In
Descartes' system, space is identical with matter. The existence of a spatial realm is the existence of extended substance. This existence is viewed by Descartes as something
that must be argued for. Descartes never contemplates arguing for the existence of our own conscious states,
thoughts, and ideas. The point of the cogito in this context is
precisely to show the impossibility of thinking of my own
mental states as something for which I could stand in need
of an argument. Stated in terms of "intuition", for Descartes the mental and inner is intuited, while the nonmental, outer, and spatial is not intuited, but is a matter of a
relatively tenuous hypothesis. For Hume, too, "impressions
and ideas," both of which are mental things, are the only
things "really present with the mind" (Treatise, I, ii, 6), while
the existence of extended bodily things is only recognized
with the help of naturally implanted though rationally unsupported beliefs. In the case of Berkeley, the given does
not include anything outside the mind for, indeed, there are
no extra-mental realities at all.
Thus, the Cartesian-empiricist's conception of consciousness is pretty much what Kant calls just inner sense.
Kant gives us a whole mental faculty, namely, outer sense,
beyond any cognitive equipment assigned us by the idealist tradition. The outer in Kant's system is given in intuition just as the inner is given in intuition. And the outer is
not the mental.
_
It is -not surprising that Kant thinks that his acceptance
of outer sense sufficiently distinguishes his view from any
form of idealism. His theory of outer intuition also explains why he is so unconcerned about egocentric and
sceptical problems which inevitably make up the first order of business from the Cartesian viewpoint. These problems will not arise if we find nonmental objects in space
among what is immediately given. In the Cartesian-empiricist tradition, we can say that the problem of outer reality
is the problem of the existence of spatial things to correspond to our ideas of spatial things, ideas which are not
themselves spatial things. "The problem of the external
world" means the world of spatially locatable things all of
which are, unlike any idea, external to the mind. In Kant's
scheme spatial things are given. They are given to outer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�sense so that the problem of the exte,nal world cannot be
put in the usual way at all. Kant's empirical realism is the
assertion that objects in space are given.
Sometimes Kant calls the opposed vi'ew "empirical idealism." Just as transcendental idealism means that spatial
things are only ideas and nothing real in the sphere of
things as they are in themselves, empirical idealism means
that contents of our conscious experience of spatial things
consist merely in ideas of spatial things and offer nothing
at all in the way of actually existing spatial objects. The
idealist view that objects of experience are nothing real in
space is "problematic" in Hume, in that Hume thinks that
there may be outer objects as well as ideas, and dogmatic
in Berkeley, who thinks that there cannot possibly be outer
objects as well as ideas. In Kant's thinking, we are not limited to a foundation of ideas of spatial things any more
than we are limited to a foundation of ideas of mental
things. Both are present to us as immediately as anything
can be. Naturally, Kant found it hard to accept early criticisms that bracketed his theory with Berkeley's. Berkeley
denies more explicitly than anyone else the immediacy of
spatial things outside the mind, and then he goes on to
deny the existence of spatial things outside the mind.
Upon the least examination, however, Kant's empirical
realism turns out to be a fragile thing. Although outer
sense represents things "as outside us and all without exception in space," Kant says, again and again, throughout
the Critique, that space exists only "in us," that, like time,
space would be nothing apart from the human cognitive
constitution. Spatial appearances exist only "in the faculty
of representations," (A 104) and "all objects with which we
can occupy ourselves, are one and all in me ... " (A 129).
The mind absorbs spatial objects in this prominent Kantian claim. The innerness and mind-dependence of all objects seems to set at nothing the thought that Kant has
distinguished his position from that of the Cartesianempiricist. When we have come a good way into the Critique, to the Paralogisms wherein Kant explains the illusions to which rationalist philosophy of mind is susceptible, he says
The expression "outside us" is unavoidably ambiguous in
meaning, sometimes signifying what as a thing in itself exists
apart from us, and sometimes what belongs solely to outer ex-
perience. [A 373]
The view so clearly put here contradicts the claim that the
theory of outer sense separates Kant's philosophy from all
the forms of idealism that Descartes' account of mind and
perception generates. Kant tells us here that outer appearances do not exist uapart from us." What can this mean if
not that they do not exist outside our minds and thoughts?
The relevant problem that the Cartesian tradition seemed
to face might be put in the question, "Are there spatial
things which exist apart from us, that is, apart from
our thoughts and representations of spatial things?" Of
course, Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume all know that,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
within our thought, we find ideas of spatial things and that
these ideas differ from ideas of things which are not spatial. In mounting a proof of the existence of extended reality Descartes is responding to the fact that ideas of spatial
things do not exist apart from us, while spatial things, if
any there be, do exist apart from us.
The whole Kantian theory asserting the necessary existence (if experience is to be possible) of causally connected
and enduring empirical objects, the theory secured with
such energy and subtlety in the Analytic half of the Critique, seems to be thrown away here when Kant says that
none of these realities are anything at all outside our own
thinking. This collapse of the pretensions of outer sense
reminds us that Kant sometimes confines his opposition to
idealism to a very different line of thought. This alternative opposition merely stresses that Kant accepts, while
idealists deny or doubt, the existence of things as they are
in themselves in addition to appearances or objects of experience. Arguing in this vein, Kant places no weight at all
on outer sense, as though he realizes that, in his system,
outer sense is simply not outer enough to reach any nonmental realities that may exist apart from us.
In the section of the Critique entitled, "The Ground of
the Distinction of All Objects in General into Phenomena
and Noumena," that is, into appearances and things as
they are in themselves, Kant goes so far as to reduce the
concept of a reality beyond that of appearances to the status of a "merely negative concept" (A 254, B 309). By this
he means that the idea of noumena is simply the idea of
realities that are not known in experience. Since objects of
experience are all the objects of which we can have any
knowledge, noumena, if there are any, are just objects of
which we have no knowledge. Kant goes on to call the very
concept of such further, wholly unknown, realities a
"problematic concept" and a "limiting concept" (A 255,
B 3ll) and he seems to imply that we cannot get quite as
far as the unqualified assertion that there are any such
noumena. The concept of a further kind of being beyond
appearances only clearly marks the end of the realm of objects of whose existence we are sure, namely, the minddependent objects constituting the empirical world. Kant
is saying that we think of mind-dependent realities as appearances of real entities other than themselves but that,
perhaps, there is no other reality, in which case appearances are not really appearances but, instead, they are the
only kinds of things that there are apart from the minds
which intuit these things. Is this not exactly Berkeley's
view? The idea that, for the things immediately present to
the mind, esse is percipi is the idea that we have no right to
think of these things as appearances. Berkeley's ontology
is limited to the ideas present to minds and the minds to
which those ideas are present. If we are forced to interpret
Kant as surrendering the true outerness of appearances in
favor of a counterfeit outerness of space which exists only
in our minds, then his whole metaphysics must appear an
enormous disappointment and all of the famous and diffi-
17
�cult arguments of the first half of the Critique must seem a
waste of effort.
2 Transcendental Aesthetic
In the hope of salvaging as much as possible from this
threatening disappointment let us examine in more detail
the main doctrines of the Transcendental Aesthetic which
I identify as follows: (a) the metaphysical expositions of
space and time, (b) the transcendental expositions, (c) the
view that space and time are forms of outer and inner
sense respectively, and (d) their asserted transcendental
ideality.
The opening section of the Aesthetic is concerned with
the definition of "intuition" (Anschauung) and related
concepts that underlie Kant's controlling distinction between receptivity and spontaneity, that is, between the
functions of intuition and those of understanding and reason. There follow immediately separate and parallel discussions of space and time. In each case a four~point meta~
physical exposition of the concept is supposed to be
followed by a transcendental exposition, but the passages
are marred by Kant's curious failure to adhere to the distinction between these two points of view, even though
the distinction seems to have been invented by him precisely for the purpose of facilitating this very discussion.
The four metaphysical points are that space, or time, is
(1) not an empirical concept, (2) an a priori and necessary
concept, (3) a singular rather than a discursive concept,
and (4) a concept of something infinite.
The expository confusion in both discussions consists in
Kant's inserting the transcendental considerations between the second and third metaphysical points and then
only partially correcting the disorder in passages that follow and in changes in the second edition. The actual reason for this, I believe, is that Kant wants to make the transcendental points in the context of the premises relevant
to them. These premises are the first two metaphysical
points and only those two. In a later passage Kant himself
explains the arrangement saying that he wanted to save
space. But the confused ordering does not save any space
unless Kant means that, with any other organization, he
would have had to restate the needed metaphysical views
in order to connect them with the transcendental exposition which would be separated from them.
In the instances of both space and time, the four metaphysical points are assertions for which no arguments are
given. Perhaps by a metaphysical exposition Kant means
an account that ought to be accessible to any highly intelligent and philosophically mature common sense. He seems
to expect that the statement of the claims will suffice for
their acceptance. This is not entirely unreasonable in that
there is much to be said for the four points.
The first point, considering only space for the moment,
is that space is not an empirical concept. Kant says that the
18
concept of space is presupposed for rather than derived
from experience. To see what Kant has in mind it is useful
to refer to another similar point that Kant often makes
later in the Critique. Unlike ordinary empirical objects,
space is not itself perceived. So space is not a concept like
the concept ocean or box. These are empirical concepts
which we possess because we encounter such things as
oceans and boxes in our perceptual experience. Of course,
space might be an empirical concept, although not an object of perception, if it figured in hypotheses belonging to
an explanatory theory, in the way in which the concept of
a gravitational field figures in theories that explain the perceived motion of objects. Kant's second metaphysical
point rules out this kind of theoretical status for the concept of space. Space is necessary for any outer experience
at all, while theoretical objects are doubly contingent and
never necessary. Theoretical objects are contingent, first,
because the facts which they are introduced to explain are
contingent facts. But theoretical objects have a second
kind of contingency beyond the contingency of the facts
they explain. For theoretical objects may always be repudiated in favor of other theoretical commitments that explain the same facts even better. The status of space is
nothing like this because, according to Kant, there could
not be any facts of outer intuition without space.
Kant expresses the necessity of space saying that we can
think space empty but we cannot think it away. The inhibition on thinking space away is related to the fact that space
is not something we detect by perceiving it or experiencing it. Things that we do detect by perceiving them, things
like oceans and boxes, we can think of as empty (oceans
empty of fish, and boxes empty of apples, respectively) and
we can also think such things away, that is, think a universe without oceans or boxes among its constituents.
Now thinking space empty is simply thinking away all of
the constituents of the outer universe. 'Since space is not
one of these, we have nothing to bring under the heading
of thinking away space itself. There is nothing else that
might disappear from the outer beyond the things that appear in it, and space is not one of these things. Kant reads
the fact that we perceive things in space and that space is
not threatened by disappearance as the necessity of space.
The two other metaphysical points are of less importance to our present interests. That space is not a discur~
sive concept, as the concepts ocean and box are, means
that it is the idea of an individual. There is just one space
in which all outer things are located. The plural "spaces"
indicates only parts of space and not instances of space,
while oceans and boxes are instances, not parts. This is a
very important assertion since it is the foundation of the
unity and uniqueness of the spatia-temporal universe and,
thus, of the connectability in principle of all objects of possible experience. The final claim, the infinity of space, we
can pass over without comment here.
The metaphysical expositions are reflections on the
concepts of space and time which do not depend on any
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�special commitments, nor on any ch')racteristically Kantian critical or transcendental argume.nts. The transcendental expositions, which are loosely derived from the
metaphysical, plunge us at once into specifically Kantian
doctrine as well as into considerable obscurity. From the
nonempirical yet necessary status of space and time, the
transcendental expositions purport to explain how it is
that we possess knowledge in geometry (in the case of
space) and knowledge of a much more vaguely indicated
body of more or less mathematical doctrine (in the case of
time.) The explanation is more implied than stated, and it
makes minimal sense only in the context of views about
necessary truth, mathematics, and experience which are
not themselves discussed in the Aesthetic, although they
have been sketched in the Introduction to the Critique.
The root idea is that no necessary truth can be justified
on a foundation of empirical evidence. Kant takes this to
have been established definitively by Hume. If we learned
about space empirically, as we learn about boxes and
oceans, no knowledge of space could amount to necessary
truth. But knowledge of space is geometry and geometry is
a body of necessary truth. The discussion here in the Aesthetic makes no effort to explain how truths about space
are actually reached but rests content with the general
thought that, since our idea of space is not derived empirically, propositions about the structure of space can also be
expected to be nonempirical. Kant always takes it for
granted that we do possess knowledge in mathematics and
that the mathematical propositions we know are synthetic
(rather than analytic), and necessary (which requires that
they be a priori.) The tenor of Kant's thought is illuminated by a comment he makes on Hume's view that belief
in strictly universal and necessary propositions is not rationally justifiable: "[Hume] ... would never have been
guilty of this statement so destructive of pure philosophy,
for he would have recognized that according to his arguments pure mathematics would also not be possible; and
from such an assertion his good sense would have saved
him" (B 20). Here Kant shows his conviction that we must
find some explanation for necessity in mathematical
knowledge since we do possess such knowledge, and he
also reveals his rather sketchy knowledge of Hume's opinions. For, concerning geometry, Hume did extend his
scepticism to mathematics in the Treatise of Human Nature, and he said that theorems of geometry are only approximations: "As the ultimate standard of these figures is
derived from nothing but the senses and imagination, 'tis
absurd to speak of any perfection beyond what these faculties can judge of; since the true perfection of anything
consists in its conformity to its standard" (I, ii, 4).
The transcendental expositions of space and time constitute an answer early in the Critique to one form of the
great motivating question, ((How is synthetic a priori
knowledge possible?" The answer that explains how synthetic a priori mathematical knowledge is possible is, however, only a sketch or a promise of an answer the full verTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sion of which depends not only on the thought that space
and time are necessary and a priori concepts but also on
the claim that there are what Kant calls "a priori manifolds" of space and time and "a priori syntheses" of these
manifolds in the course of which the objects of mathematical truths are "constructed," in Kant's terminology.
It is only because space and time are recognizable as
forms of outer and inner sense that Kant is able to assert
their transcendental ideality. For this ideality means that
things as they are in themselves are not spatia-temporal
things. On the surface of it, such a claim contradicts the
general impossibility of knowledge of things as they are in
themselves. In the absence of the identification of space
and time as forms, Kant could at best assert that we do not
know whether or not things as they are in themselves are
characterizable in spatial or temporal terms. The relevance of the formal status of space can be illustrated in
analogies. Imagine an illiterate who learns to read only
telegrams. At one stage he has come to understand that
the words printed on the telegram make up a verbal message received somehow from a distant person. But at this
stage he interprets every word on the form as part of the
message, including, for example, the words "Western
Union." He will have to learn that these words are imposed by the form and are not part of the content. It would
be absurd for this reader to wonder, after learning the status of "Western Union," whether there might be another
"Western Union" which is part of the content of every
message as it is in itself Of course, we might think that
anything might be part of the hidden content of a message. But no part of the content can have just the role and
meaning that the words "Western Union" have on the
telegram blank because that meaning and role contrast
with content by definition.
Such an analogy is imperfect in that "Western Union" is
part of the telegram form on which the matter is organized, but it is not a necessary part, while, according to
Kant, space and time are necessary forms for the organiza-
tion of the matter that we receive in intuition. The essential contrast of form and content is preserved in the analogy. Once we have identified space and time as forms, it is
absurd to suppose that these concepts might also characterize the unknown source of intuitive inputs. Therefore,
this identification of space and time relieves the appearance of contradiction in the assertion that unknowable
things in themselves are not in space and time.
All of this depends on understanding in what sense we
might think of space and time as forms. The word "form",
which is the same in Kant's German discussion, appeals to
the contrast between matter and form that goes back to
Greek thought. Kant says that space is "nothing other
than simply the form of all appearances of outer sense."
The traditional contrast is filled out when Kant identifies
sensation as the matter of such appearances. According to
the traditional distinction, an individual existing thing has
to have both form and matter. Matter cannot exist without
19
�form, that is, without being anything in particular, and
form cannot exist, Platonism apar'\, without being the
form of some matter. Kant's conception of an appearance
conforms, at least superficially, to this pattern. As far as
outer sense is concerned, the matter of an appearance con~
sists of sensible qualities such as color and texture, which
fill formal elements such as surfaces and volumes and so
constitute perceivable objects of some magnitude.
We saw that the pretension of Kant's empirical realism
seems to collapse with the absorbtion of space by the
mind. This absorption, in turn, is clearly traceable to the
claims of the Aesthetic. Space is identified as the form of
outer sense and, furthermore, as a form imposed by us.
This identification "internalizes" space and it is necessary
for the transcendental exposition. This understanding of
space is required for Kant's explanation of our possession
of synthetic a priori knowledge in geometry. Therefore,
space, the imposed form of outer things, cannot be used to
secure the distinction between Kant's views and the ideal·
ists'. We shall now consider the possibility that the matter
of outer sense might play this role.
-
3 The Construction of Spatial Objects
In expressing his opposition to idealism, Kant's appeal
to the accessibility of objects of outer sense is so clear and
emphatic that it is hard to think of it as simply a mistake.
No doubt the force of the Cartesian contrast between the
spatial, extended, and material world and the conscious
unextended mind inclines him to express his thought
about the nonmental outer in terms of spatiality. There is
certainly something wrong with this mode of expression.
Kant, however, did not simply fail to notice that the mind·
imposed status of space is incompatible with the employment of space as the mark of the nonmental existence of
things apart from us. Is it possible that he rests his rejection
of idealism, not on the form of objects of outer sense, but
on their matter; not on space, but on sensation?
The matter of outer appearance is its sensuous aspect.
This is what Kant calls sensation (Empfindung). Sensation
makes up the stuff of which spatial organization is the required form. This statement has to be replaced by a much
more theoretical understanding of sensations and their relationship to perceivable objects. Our receptive faculty
gives sensations a spatial location. But we cannot think of
this receptivity as literally operating on received sensible
qualities. We cannot suppose, for example, that it is a feature of our receptivity to assign a color sensation to a place
because Kant states very clearly that, prior to any synthesizing activity, individual sensations do not have any
ex~
tension at all. Sensible qualities such as color are the sorts
of things of which we can be conscious as the perceivable
features of an object, as the color of a surface, for example.
As such, sensible features themselves are the product of
synthesis, in this case, of a kind of aggregating activity op·
20
erating on unextended sensations which have been located in the same region. Only the resulting aggregate deserves to be described in color language. The unextended
content of a single sensation is located but is not perceivable. This is the claim of the Axioms of Intuition according
to which all objects of experience are extended magnitudes and, therefore, aggregates, the least constituents of
which are not perceivable.
We are treating a major side of Kant's thinking which
has come to be an embarrassment to modern admirers of
Kant. The machinery of the mind, the transcendental psychology, in which Kant tries to depict the actual procedures whereby raw materials are transformed into a world
of experience is a "wholly fictional subject matter," as
P. F. Strawson described it. If anything is acceptable in
this Kantian enterprise it will certainly have to be drastically redescribed in some way that gets away from the idiom of quasimechanical speculation. At the same time,
however little is retained of this account of the mind making nature, no understanding of what is best in Kant's
thought is possible if these speculations are simply ignored. Neglect encourages, in particular, a mistaken interpretation of the terms of Kant's theories which tends to
place them in a spuriously direct relationship to common
sense concepts.
According to Kant, unknown things as they are in themselves affect us and unextended sensations are engendered
as a consequence. In the process our receptive constitu~
tion deploys these sensations in space. The various combinatory powers that Kant ascribes to the human mind under the title of powers of synthesis survey these located
sensations and assemble objects from them. These are perceivable objects and they, rather than their theoretical
constituent sensations, are the first items accessible to
consciousness. There are no objects of consciousness
more primitive than perceivable objects. Many of the important claims of the Analytic come from the idea that any
conscious experience at all, and any self-consciousness, is
conditioned by the completion of this mental construction
of objects of perception. The ultimate constituents for the
construction of objects with perceivable features are sensations, but they do not have perceivable features. The
term "sensation" in eighteenth century philosophical parlance is ordinarily used for qualities apprehended, such as
heat and color. Kant's constituents are called sensations
only in virtue of the extended perceivable things which
have sensible qualities and which are supposed to be made
out of sensations.
This style of thought, prominent throughout the Critique, becomes easier to understand when we see it in the
context of the thought of Leibniz, who exerted a decisive
influence on Kant in just these theories of mental construction. The whole format for the construction of a scientific world of phenomena out of elements of which we
are not conscious is taken over from Leibniz's account of
apperception. Conscious experience results, for Leibniz,
WIN1ER/SPRING 1983
�from the aggregation of innumerable unconscious petites
perceptions. The motion of the sea is perceived as a roar
only because the mind must aggregate the infinite events
which make up the motion of the water, each one of which
is itself silent, and the mind perceives only the aggregate
(confusedly, without distinguishing the constituent events)
as sound. For Leibniz the spatia-temporal character of
things is phenomenal, that is, it reflects not the reality of
the things experienced but the conditions the mind imposes in the process of experiencing anything at all. So underlying realities are unextended but, to be perceived,
they are represented in aggregates that produce the perspectival spatia-temporal subject matter of human experience and knowledge. So for Leibniz, phenomenal reality is
not a valueless illusion. Phenomena be_ne fundata offer a
kind of surrogate for metaphysical reality and truth. As in
Kant, phenomena are the locus of all scientific thought.
The elements wfiich ai-erelated in our best thought do correspond globally to reality although there is no one-to-one
correspondence of appearance and reality. The ambiguous evaluation of phenomenal reality in Kant's system and
the theory of transcendental ideality have their roots in
Leibniz' s thinking.
We have sketched Kant's idea of the construction of empirical objects out of sensations. We are now in a position
to address Kant's idea of the constructions the mind
makes in the pure or a priori manifolds of space and time.
Kant says that "transcendental logic" differs from ordinary
or general logic, in that it has its own subject matter, an a
priori subject matter, to which the basic combinatory
forms of general logic are applied. The a priori manifolds
of space and time make up this self-contained field of application for transcendental logic (A 55, B 79).
The concept of these a priori manifolds can be understood in terms of what we have said about sensation. Kant
says that our receptivity includes a location-assigning procedure which places sensations in space where they are
ready for synthesis into perceivable spatial objects. Pure
space, or the a priori manifold of outer sense, is just the
idea of the system of locations by themselves, without any
sensations assigned to them. Perhaps there is a big difference between a location-assigning system, and a system of
locations to which things can·be assigned. In virtue of the
former Kant speaks of space as the form of outer intuition,
while only in virtue of the latter can he speak of space itself as an intuition, and an a priori intuition at that. Kant
plainly believes that he is entitled to the transition from
the former to the latter, but there is little or no mention of
this issue in the Critique.
Here we should see the Kantian position as an attempt
at a compromise between the conceptions of space defended by Leibniz and by Newton. Newton insisted on an
absolute container space which would exist whether or not
there were any spatial things to be found anywhere in
space. In the Correspondence with Clarke, Leibniz repudiated this on roughly verificationist grounds and he asTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
serted that space is a system of relations between coexistent entities. There would be no space were there to be no
things spatially related. Kant was attracted by the Leibnizean account but he remained convinced that something
like absolute space is conceptually indispensable because
of a curious argument about incongruent counterparts.
Congruent objects are those that have the same shape and
the same dimensions. Two such figures can occupy the
same space. When superimposed they fit each other exactly. Two gloves of a pair are close to congruence but they
cannot occupy the same space because of the left-hand
orientation of the one and the right-hand orientation of
the other. Since the internal spatial relations of the parts
of each glove are the same, it appears that, were Leibniz
right about space, there would be no difference at all between a universe consisting only of a left-hand glove and a
universe consisting of a right-hand glove of the same dimensions. All relations between coexisting things would
be the same in each universe. Kant is intuitively convinced
that Leibniz's theory of space makes it impossible to represent a difference that would be real here. The problem is
solved by the existence of absolute space, since the two
gloves would have different relations to absolute space and
would necessarily fill different regions of it.
In Kant's system, the whole discussion of the status of
space is brought within the domain of appearances.
Things located in space are, first, sensations, and second,
material objects. Is there space in the absence of spatial
things? There is not in the sense that space is transcendentally ideal and does not exist apart from the outer sense
which is a component of our cognitive constitution. But
space does exist apart from spatial things in the sense in
which outer sense offers a system of places which is independent of the fact that sensations are arranged in that
system. This means that the impossibility of thinking
space away carries an implication for the thing-like character of space itself which goes beyond the metaphysical exposition, which is compatible with Leibniz's theory. Newton thought that we need an absolute container space in
order to distinguish absolute and relative motion. Analogously, Kant thinks that we require such a space in order
to solve the problem of incongruent counterparts. Therefore, although he makes space phenomenal as Leibniz did,
Kant's a priori space with neither sensations nor objects in
it functions as absolute space, within Kant's thinking, just
as absolute space outside the mind functions in Newton's.
This commitment to absolute space allows Kant to
think of the location-assigning aspect of outer sense as an a
priori system of locations. "[S]pace and time are represented a priori not merely as forms of sensible intuition,
but as themselves intuitions which contain a manifold ... "
(B 160). We can think of pure space as something like an
armature on which sensations are organized. The chief
doctrines of the transcendental logic and, prominently,
the Principles, result from the consideration of the powers
of combination that men possess applied to these empty
21
�but a priori manifolds. The Axioms, Anticipations, Analo·
gies, and Postulates are said to be a'priori laws of nature.
They are supposed to hold for the empirical realm because
empirical objects are the result of applying the very same
constructive powers to the same manifolds of space and
time, but when these manifolds are filled with sensation.
The structural laws which result from the application of
combinatory creativity to empty space are true of the
empty proto-objects constructed of empty locations.
Therefore, they are also automatically true when these locations are assigned sensations with the combining procedures unchanged.
In the simplest case, that is, the Axioms of Intuition, we
are to understand that the laws of extended magnitude are
generated along with the extended objects of which they
are true. This is achieved when the pure manifold of nonempirical space is synthesized so that empty points are assembled into empty regions, surfaces, and volumes. Since
the empirical manifold results simply from filling the same
locations with sensation, the same geometrical laws will
hold for empirical and pure space. Geometrically describable objects arise from the aggregation oflocations. This is
the detailed story that lies behind the transcendental exposition of space in the Aesthetic. Whether the constructed
objects are empirically full or empty makes no difference
to their geometrical properties.
4 Sensation and the Objectivity of
Outer Sense
We saw that space, as ithe region of outer things, collapsed back into the mind because space is only a mindimposed form and spatiality does not characterize things
as they are in themselves or even sensations, apart from
the location-assigning propensities of our own minds.
Since the outerness of space is all in the mind, Kant's system seems to be no improvement on the perennial idealistic weaknesses of the Cartesian-empiricist outlook. But we
have raised the question whether Kant intended spatiality
to be the aspect of outer appearances that carried the crucial burden of realism. We have examined Kant's conception of sensation, space, and objects with a view to determining whether or not sensation, the matter of outer
objects, might be the needed support for Kant's anti-idealist assertions. Kant never says that sensation is imposed by
us, or that the mind makes sensations. If he meant sensation to carry the burden of realism, it would be understandable that Kant should frequently assert, as he does,
both that outer sense refutes idealism and that space exists
only in us, and that he should assert both in the same context of discussion. There is much in favor of this interpretation although, as we shall see, it cannot be the whole of
his thought about the connection of outer sense and mindindependent reality.
In a revealing passage just prior to the Transcendental
Deduction of the Categories Kant says
1
22
There are only two possible ways in which synthetic representations and their objects can establish connection, obtain necessary relation to one another, and, as it were, meet one another. Either the object alone must make the representation
possible, or the representation alone must make the object
possible. In the former case, the relation is only empirical, and
the representation is never possible a priori. This is true of
appearances, as regards that element in them which belongs
to sensation. In the latter case 1 representation itself does not
produce its object in so far as existence is concerned 1 for we
are not speaking here of its causality by means of the will.
Nonetheless the representation is a priori determinant of the
object, if it be the case that only through the representation is
1
it possible to know anything as an object. [A 92]
This passage has implications for the meaning of Kant's
entire transcendental philosophy. According to the Cartesian-empiricist way of thinking, our knowledge of external
things, if we have any, is based on the fact that those external things cause our representations. Kant would say that,
within that framework of metaphysical thought, these
philosophers have supposed that spatially extended objects are mind-independent entities that "make possible"
our representations. The revolutionary character of his
thought is that Kant will say that sometimes the dependence runs the other way so that our representation makes
possible the object. At its most idealistic, this amounts to a
reductive phenomenalism in the manner of Berkeley. The
idea of empirical objects of perception is simply the idea of
groups and patterns among transient subjective experiences. But in the passage just quoted Kant expresses a far
less idealistic view and expressly denies the reduction of
objects to representations.
Within the passage there are two themes that we will
consider separately. First Kant says that the empirical part
of representation that is sensation is "made possible'' by
the object. In other words, with respect to sensation,
Kant's view resembles the Cartesian-empiricist line of
thought. Something outside the mind is responsible for
the sensation. The object in question is certainly the thing
in itself. This is the mind-independent reality that affects
us and engenders sensations. The sensation is a representation and as such, it is called a "modification of our receptive faculty" and it is, in consequence, also something
in us and in the mind. But these original representations
are not the product of our own creative faculties. They are
received. They would not exist at all were it not for things
as they are in themselves. We will treat this relation between sensations and reality immediately in assessing the
appeal to sensation as the chief support of realism.
The second theme of the quoted passage will become
important at the end of our discussion. This is Kant's statement that even in those contexts where it is right to say
that the representation makes possible its object, we
should not think that this means that representatioBs •produce objects in point of existence (dem Dasein nach), but
only that the representation makes it possible for us to
know realities as objects. In other words, Kant repudiates
1
1
1
1
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�any scheme which would try to reduce objects of representations to representations themselves, a~ radical phenomenalism, for example, reduces material objects to sense
data. We are never to say that an object of knowledge is
nothing more than our representations and the patterns
detectable among them. Kant's phenomenalism does not
account for the existence of objects known but only for
their objecthood in our knowledge. In other words, we are
constitutionally disposed to represent realities independent of our minds as objects of perception. All of the characteristics of objects of perception have an irreducible
mind-dependence. But it is still independent reality that
has become an object for us. The scheme of representation does not create the object that it represents. In the
last analysis, it is things as they are in themselves that are
represented in experience of spatial objects. In experience, independent reality is represented as a system of stable objects of perception in causal interconnection with
one another. There are a great many passages in which
Kant expresses a phenomenalism far more radical than
this. For the present let us return to the more limited claim
about the character of sensation.
How should we understand the question, "Does the object make the representation possible, or does the representation make the object possible?" Let us call this the
priority question. In itself it seems to presuppose a distinction between representations and objects, while this presupposition is one of the things at issue in the confrontation of realism and idealism. Kant's term "Vorstellung" is
broader than anything the English word "representation"
naturally suggests. It is meant to cover not only perceptual
contents but also all intuitions, pure and empirical. Elementary sensations which are not conscious contents are
nonetheless representations. Furthermore, all concepts,
pure and empirical, are representations. Even concepts
which are defective precisely in failing to represent anything, such as the Ideas of Reason, are representations. It
is important to appreciate the abstractness of Kant's usage
here because it reveals his willingness to speak of representations whether or not they represent anything and
whether or not they are conscious items that represent
something to anyone. In the context of the priority question, Kant is thinking of representations as contents of
perceptual experience like the ideas of Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume, but he is also including elementary unextended sensations which are not conscious and have no
role at all in the empiricist tradition. These, as we said,
come into Kant's picture from Leibniz's concept of petites
perceptions.
Kant means us to think that it is idealists like Berkeley
who hold that representations make possible objects.
Berkeley says that an object like a cherry is a bundle of
ideas of sense, including some red ideas, some round ideas,
and some sweet ideas. There are cherries only in that we
have such ideas in such bundles. When Kant addresses the
priority question himself, his thinking focuses on elemenTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tary sensations and their origin because even red ideas are
a product of synthetic activity. Elementary sensations are
the ones which objects plainly make possible. What objects? Here Kant must mean the things in themselves that
engender sensations by affecting us. So it is, indeed,
Kant's doctrine of sensation and not his theory of spatiality that opposes idealism.
The obscurity that darkens this opinion comes from the
fact that Kant thinks that these very same sensations do
make possible objects, namely, empirical objects. The procedures of combinatory synthesis which we have sketched
operate by assembling perceivable objects out of elementary sensations. So sensations both make possible objects
and are made possible by objects and, in different contexts, Kant gives both answers to the priority question.
We confront here one of the confusions in Kant's
thought that comes from his dual standard for questions
about reality. There are empirical objects and transcendental things in themselves. Sensations are made possible
by things in themselves, and sensations make possible empirical objects. At times, Kant encourages us to think of
things in space as the locus of nonmental being, and he
defines inner sense as access to mental things. This is Descartes' opinion but, if it is also Kant's, then his theory
seems to coincide with idealism. The allegedly nonmental
spatial world is a construct from representations (sensations.) When he asserts his realism, Kant forgets or repudiates the suggestion that spatial things are nonmental and
he counts objects in space as representations along with
sensations. They are all mind-dependent realities and
Kant asks of this whole class of things, Do they make possible mind-independent objects? He decides for realism in
answering this question. Of course, sensations make objects of perception in space possible, but then they are just
appearances. As appearances, they represent realities
which are not just appearances. In our spatial representations, realities which are not representations or appearances become objects for us. "Through the representation
it is possible to know anything as an object."
The underlying difficulty of the dual realities is compounded by ambiguities in the concept of representation.
Consider again Berkeley's understanding of the nature of
a cherry. We should not really describe Berkeley's bundle
theory of perceived objects as the view that representations make possible (or make) objects. The term "representation" is out of place in this description. An element in a
bundle does not represent the bundle anymore than a brick
represents a wall of which it is an element. The idealist
theory really amounts to a renunciation of urepresenta~
tion" as a concept suitable for ideas of sense. The point of
idealism is that there is nothing nonmental for mental
items to represent. An analogous but restricted point holds
for Kant's phenomenalism. The construction of perceivable objects out of spatially deployed sensations by our faculties does not generate an account of objects of perception within which we can say that sensations represent
23
�perceived objects in space. But KaJ!t does like to say that
"we represent objects as outside us ')nd all without exception in space." Using such phrases he allows himself to
think of representations as items having spatial objects
which they represent. But Kant constructs spatial objects
out of elements found in the manifold of outer sense. So it
is quite misleading for him to suggest that those elements
represent spatial objects. In the history of reductive phenomenalism, this illicit use of "representation" frequently
lends plausibility to otherwise unpalatable accounts. As
long as the concept of representation is illicitly retained,
the harshness of the reduction is softened. For the concept implies that there is still a difference between representations and objects of just the sort that the reduction
intends to deny.
We have sa!d~ihat representations make possible empirical objects and are made possible by transcendental ob·
jects. If we delete the implication, which Kant frequently
allows himself, that inner elements represent constructed
objects in space, on the ground that this is an illicit use of
"represenf', a univocal and relatively clear anti-idealist
line of thought emerges and it is, I believe, a major part of
what Kant did want to say on this topic.
What the Cartesian-empiricist tradition calls objects in
space are simply complex representations according to Kant.
The processes envisioned in the Analytic try to describe how
we form such representations. If we ask how it is that spatial
things have the status of representations of anything, we
must say, in Kant's thought, that they inherit this status from
their constituent sensations. So the representational charac·
ter of perceptual experience is traceable to sensation. Sensa·
tion is the proper foundation for realism.
This way of reading Kant's treatment of the priority
question may seem to fall short of his expressed views in
two ways. First, Kant habitually speaks of perceived ob·
jects in space as obiects and seldom as representations, and
much of the Analytic itself is dominated by a usage of "ob·
ject" in which it is obviously spatial things that are objects
and not things in themselves. Second, the priority question, we said, presupposes a distinction between represen-
tations and objects. If we interpret the objects of which
the priority question inquires as transcendental objects,
Kant's ignorabimus will imply that we have no means at all
for making good this distinction. If spatial objects are just
representations we have no further objects to play the role
of things represented.
Concerning the first of these reservations, Kant is cer-
tainly entitled to speak of objects of perception, and em·
pirical objects and objects in space. We could not plausibly
propose that he should only speak of empirical, perceptual, and spatial representations. But all these things are objects only because we think about them, and make judgments about them, and investigate them scientifically.
Conscious contents involve objects and not merely representations because these contents figure as the subject
matter of thought.
24
Objects are given to us by means of sensibility; they are
thought through the understanding. . . . But all thought
must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility [sensible representations], because in no other way can
an object be given to us. [A 19, B 33)
In other words, mind-independent reality becomes an ob·
ject for us by engendering sensations and thence empirical
representations. Then these representations also become
objects of thought and thought about them is thought
about reality precisely because it is traceable to these
sensations.
Reflection on the second reservation bears out this un·
derstanding. Since Kant holds that we can know nothing
about things in themselves (and sometimes goes so far as
to put in doubt the thought that there are any), we are
tempted to think, and Kant is also tempted to think, that
he means that empirical realities are the only ones that can
figure at all in our philosophical account of things. There
is no question, for Kant, of getting beyond the empirical
object. This "going beyond appearance" is the issue for
the old Cartesian-empiricist outlook. Mathematical characterizations, for example, manage to penetrate to things
as they are apart from our experience. Mathematical
thinking, it seems, enables us to get at, and not merely to
represent, reality. But this is no part of Kant's scheme. For
Kant, getting at reality is representing it. We cannot make a
comparison of represented and unrepresented reality. In
consequence, we should not interpret the priority question as presupposing that we can make such a comparison.
Unrepresented reality cannot be compared with anything
because being represented is the condition for figuring in
any comparison we can make.
In his relationship to the idealist problems generated by
the Cartesian philosophy of mind, Kant is actually the
champion of the concept of representation. The idealist
renounces representation by denying reality to anything
but the mental content itself. There is nothing to be represented. The nonidealist within the Cartesian tradition also
rejects the idea of representation in his aspiration to get
beyond appearances so as to compare unrepresented reality with our ideas of it. The great Cartesian question of the
"resemblance" of ideas and their objects expresses this aspiration. This dream survives in Kant's conviction that
God knows reality without representing it, without being
affected by it, and without experiencing it. In the case of
men, Kant grasps, at least most of the time, the thought
that representation is the vehicle of knowledge of the represented, not a barrier which once interposed makes possible only knowledge of the representation itself.
Kant wants to allow space to be absorbed by the mind
and, at the same time, to single out outer sense as the
un~
compromised connection with things that exist apart from
us. Inner sense involves an element of sensation too, but
there is no mind-independent entity represented here, because inner sense is the mind's receptivity to itself. If we
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�construe inner sense as the mind, as thing in itself, affecting itself and giving rise to appearances of itself and its
state, we remain in the realm of the mental. Outer sense
starts outside the mental, not because ifs representations
are spatial, but because sensations of outer sense have
their origin in nonmental independent reality.
That sensation is the essential link to the extra-mental
explains Kant's statement in the Schematism: "Reality, in
the pure concept of understanding is that which corresponds to sensation in general ... " (A 143, B 182). And in
the Paralogisms, Kant can say, in the context of the asser-
atory benefit of the post-renaissance view. The aspect of
our representations that accept mathematical representa·
tion become transcendentally ideal for Kant. Spatial characteristics: figure, magnitude, and motion, are no longer
attributes of mind-independent reality for Kant. They exist only from our point of view. The sensuous component,
ception exhibits the reality of something in space, and in
in contrast, downgraded by the tradition, is the indispensable link to things that affect us in Kant's account.
Each component of this reversal of the evaluation of the
sensible and the mathematical has to be qualified. Kant
offers a new security for extension-dependent qualities
which remain the locus of mathematical description for
him. But the new security is an a priori foundation depen-
the absence of perception no power of imagination can in-
dent on our cognitive constitution. Numerical and
vent and produce that something. It is sensation, therefore, that indicates a reality in space or time, according as
it is related to the one or to the other mode of sensible
intuition" (A 373-4). And a few lines later, "Space is the
metrical representation ceases to be thought of as intellectual penetration that gets beyond appearance. Since
things in themselves are not spatio-temporal, mathematical propositions do not fit them. On the side of the sensible, Kant continues to think of sensation as an effect in us
and does not assert any resemblance between inner and
outer in terms of sensible features. But sensations are the
foundation of objectivity in the sense that they are the
matter of all objects for us, and they would not exist but
for the influence of things outside us. No such claim is
made for the mathematical aspect of representations. So
Kant is able to say that space represents only "possible coexistence" while perception does represent reality be-
tion that sensation is the sole input for perception, 11 Per-
representation of a mere possibility of coexistence, per-
ception is the representation of a reality" (A 374).
5 Primary and Secondary Qualities
Kant's distinction between the formal and material ingredients of empirical intuition is his inventive reworking
of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities. One of the reasons for which it is hard to appreciate Kant's reliance on sensation rather than space for
the basic connection of thinking to the nonmental is that
Kant reverses the traditional evaluation of primary and
secondary. Primary qualities, for the tradition initiated by
Galileo and perfected in the articulation of Locke's Essay,
are those which accept mathematical and prominently geometrical or spatial characterization. It is in respect of primary qualities that our ideas resemble things and correctly
represent a mind-independent reality. Our ideas of secondary qualities involve sensible characteristics like color
and heat. These are literally features of our ideas, that is,
of mental things, but they have no footing at all in nonmental outer reality.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is at the core of post-renaissance philosophy because it
explains the success of mathematical science and the failure of the earlier scholastic-Aristotelian program which relied upon a relatively naive interpretation of perceptual experience. The demotion of the sensuous to the status of
wholly subjective appearance fitted the growing understanding of the physics and physiology of perception. The
objectivity assigned to the mathematically representable
side of experience fitted the notion that mathematics is
the "language of the book of nature," with the help of
which we penetrate the veil of misleading sensuous representation to a true conception of outer reality. When Kant
trades this distinction between qualities for a distinction
between form and matter, he discards much of the explanTilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
geo~
cause perception contains empirical intuition or sensation
(A 374). We can say, then, that the synthesized, nonempirical, proto-objects, the geometrical objects of the Axioms of
Intuition, are not representations of anything. But empirical appearances are representations that must have their
object. They derive this status from sensation.
One can recognize patterns of thought from both Descartes and Leibniz subjected to imaginative permutations
by Kant in this context. According to Descartes' conception of "confused" as opposed to
~~distinct"
ideas, we are
disposed to mistake the sensuous mental effect for the extended outer cause. Thus we project sensuous content,
which is immediately intuited but not extended, onto
space, which is extended but not intuited. Descartes
thinks this projection is an understandable human error.
He explains-our disposition to this error saying that we use
the sensuous qualities as clues to the harmfulness and utility of things in the spatial environment. This disposition
contributes to self-preservation and its effect is enhanced
by the fact that we think of the clues as features of, and
not merely effects of, the objects. In this, Descartes supposes, as Kant does, that essentially unextended things
(Descartes' sensuous ideas and Kant's sensations) are projected into space by us, and then thought by us to characterize regions and surfaces. The great difference lies not in
the concept of the projection of the unextended into
space but only in the legitimacy of the projection. Descartes and any other subjectivist on secondary qualities
must say that color characterizes nothing that is actually
25
�extended, since the locus of color is, the mind where there
is nothing extended. For Kant, the same projection is not
an error but an aspect of cognitive functioning which is·
sues in a constructed perceivable object.
Like Kant, Leibniz, too, has it that an essentially non·
spatial reality is represented spatially by the human mind.
Reality is itself not spatial in two senses for Leibniz. First,
space is only a system of relations and never anything like
a container for things, and, second, this system of relations
belongs only to representations or phenomena and not to
things independently of the fact that they are mentally
represented. Leibniz was never attracted at all by the Cartesian method of doubt and the solipsistic starting point
that it fosters. He refuses to enter upon the epistemological enterprise on which Descartes wagers everything. Instead Leibniz offers an overall metaphysical account
which is to be accepted if it does justice to all of our experience and thought. He does not try to show how this account might be reached by any reflective man in the face
of the most extreme scepticism.
Within Leibniz' s account, the ultimate explanation for
the fittingness of our thought to reality is pre-established
harmony. Everyone finds this unsatisfying and Kant expresses his dissatisfaction, saying that Leibniz "intellectualized the senses." Perception is just confused thought for
Leibniz, and all thought is a self-contained activity of the
mind. There is no original input traceable to our being affected by things, because in the last analysis we are not
affected by anything, according to Leibniz, but only programmed in advance to have the mental contents that we
do have.
No doubt Kant inherits from Leibniz a starting point
alien from the Cartesian-empiricist egocentrism and solipsism. It is no part of Kant's plan to doubt whether representations are really representations and then to overcome
this doubt. Kant's acceptance of the Cartesian view that
we are affected by the things that we represent is a repudiation of Leibniz's reliance on harmony as the ultimate
foundation of knowledge. Like Leibniz, Kant understands
the spatial images of conscious perception as the aggregation by the mind of items which are not themselves extended. But like Descartes, Kant thinks that these items
are effects of outer realities. Against Descartes, with
whom he shares the notion of perceptual images as effects
of outer realities, Kant thinks that our idea of color requires that extended things be colored things. Mere ideas
will never make color intelligible without receptivity. Only
because spatial things can actually have sensible features
is it the case that "Perception exhibits the reality of something in space, and, in the absence of perception, no
power of imagination can invent or produce that something." This is related to the view that Hume expressed
saying that all ideas are copies of impressions. Though it is
found in spatial things, color is subjective, in Kant's view,
as it is for the standard theory of secondary qualities.
In this setting of the views of predecessors Kant's rear-
26
dering emerges naturally. There is some objective influence on our faculty or receptivity that is responsible for
the existence and representational character of outer intuitions. In order to think of outer reality consciously we
make spatial pictures by assembling essentially unextended sensations which have been assigned places in the
mind-imposed system of locations. These pictures, in virtue of their empirical content (sensation), represent reality
outside the mind as objects in space. Spatial pictures as
assembled objects really have surfaces and their surfaces
are really colored. Color is an emergent feature which
arises in the synthesis of a multitude of sensations which
have been assigned to locations near one another. Thus,
color stands for, and represents, the outer thing without
resembling it, while the spatial features neither stand for
nor resemble any reality. In some ways this concept of
space is like the psychological concept of a visual field. Geometrical features of things come from the features of
mind-imposed space and play no part in the relation of objects of perception to things outside the mind. This fits
nicely Kant's claim that geometry is necessary and a priori,
and yet geometrical truths are true of empirical objects.
Space is the region of all possible objects ("possible coexistence") and when space is filled with sensation, synthesis
generates apprehendable structures (empirical objects) out
of deployed sensations. That these representations represent the nonmental is due entirely to the contained sensations. The mathematical knowledge we have of such objects is, as Kant says, only a question of getting out what
we have put in ourselves. It is secondary qualities that are
responsible for the fact that experience reaches beyond
merely mental realities, while primary qualities betoken
nothing mind-independent.
6 The Spatial and the Temporal
Were sensation all there is to connection with things
outside the mind, space would be just as mental as time is.
Spatial things would be mental representations of nonmental realities, and temporal things would be mental representations of mental realities. This pleasant symmetry is
not tenable. It is contradicted by the fact that Kant clearly
requires that spatial representations be subjected to time in
order to become participants in the activities of the mind.
Some of the essential doctrines of the Critique depend,
first, on the thought that spatiality per se makes representations unfit for mental status, and, second, it is precisely
the spatiality of spatial representations that renders them
fit vehicles for securing the concept of anything enduring
at all, even of minds as enduring conscious subjects.
Kant segregates the spatial and the temporal with startling rigor. All readers follow him easily when he confines
inner mental objects to a temporal order and allows spatial
distinctions no footing in the mind. This satisfies a widely
shared intuitive conviction that thoughts are not located
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�(B)
(A)
(C)
(D)
/
anywhere and that ideas do not displace any spatial occupant Kant's confinement of the mental to time is part of
the common ground of his inner sense and Cartesian consciousness. But Kant's exclusion of time from the objects
of outer sense, which are subjected to space and space
alone, is not attuned to any widely shared philosophical
presumption. As a result, readers of Kant sometimes suppose that he does not mean to exclude temporality from
the outer. It is often said that Kant means to say that all
inner things are subject to time and all outer things to
space and time. And this seems a needed reading lest Kant
be thought to leave no conceptual room for change in the
outer world at aiL Such an understanding, however, conflicts with very simple and clear statements in the Critique
such as this one: "Time cannot be outwardly intuited anymore than space can be intuited as something in us" (A 23,
B 37). Can one hope that even such direct assertions are
open to interpretation or overridden by other considerations? We certainly must say that Kant's ultimate view is
that material objects both fill space and endure in time. In
his thinking, then, the spatial and the temporal are wedded. The point, however, is that they need to be wedded.
No object of outer intuition, considered in itself, is something that exists in time.
As a first approximation for the understanding of this
perplexing view, we can point out that time is not essential
in the realm of the extended, whether or not time, as a
matter of fact, applies to things in that realm. The fact is
that as conscious subjects we confront an outer world in
which there is change. Since this is so, we have to deploy
temporal concepts in describing that world. But this is an
empirical fact It is conceivable that we might have found
an outer reality in which there is no change whatever. Under such circumstances, change would be confined to the
domain of our conscious survey of this wholly static reality. It would not be necessary to ascribe time to both the
inner and the outer. Our first thought, then, is that time is
not absolutely necessary for the very idea of the outer, as
space is absolutely necessary.
The thought of a changeless spatial world leads to a further speculation, and one that is a lot closer to Kant's actual view of space and time. It seems theoretically possible
to deny that there is any change in the actual world and to
assert that the spatial world we do experience is a static
world. All the apparent temporal distinctions in the outer
world will have to be recast as temporal distinctions that
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
apply only in the mental world of experiences. For example, we may think of the sequence of images A-D, in the
figure 1 as the content of consecutive visual experiences of
a subject The natural interpretation of such a sequence
assigns change, and therefore time, to both the outer and
the inner. The subject's inner experience changes as the
outer car passes the tree. But we are not forced to interpret A-D as consecutive viewings of the same outer re~
gion, namely, one in which changes are taking place. We
could think of it instead as consecutive viewings of four
different regions of a wholly static space. If we think of the
images A-D as consecutive frames of a motion picture
film, then the viewing of the film realizes the possibility of
the second interpretation, that is, consecutive experiences
of four different static arrays. This analogy ignores the real
motion involved in the manipulation of the film. When we
view a film we create the illusion of change in the object
by arranging to witness related but unchanging objects in
a special temporal order. In principle, we could think of
our ordinary experience of the world as conforming to this
pattern. Therefore, the ascription of time to the outer is an
expendable convenience.
We made informal use here of the distinction between
the thing seen and the visual experience of that thing.
Kant, too, recognizes such a distinction. He frequently
says that apprehension of the manifold of intuition is always successive, whether or not the manifold itself is successive (inner) or simultaneous (outer). The perception of
a line, however short, (an example Kant likes) involves a
synthesis which is necessarily successive. The allusion to
synthesis in this opinion reminds us that outer sense does
not reveal a world in which the question, "Are there really
changes here, or not?" naturally arises. Due to outer sense
we have a range of intuitions. These are a multiplicity of
individual representations of outer things. For the description of these representations spatial terms are needed and
temporal terms are not Nothing happens in one representation. The ordinary world is not something simply given
to outer sense. The world is constructed by our synthetic
powers (the understanding) operating on material provided by receptivity. In Kant's terms the restriction of temporality to the inner means that all the temporal distinctions used in thinking of the ordinary world are traceable
to synthesis and none to outer receptivity.
Kant often speaks of the products of the synthetic
powers of the mind as objects of outer sense. For example,
27
�a line is an object of outer intuition. This seems unproblematic because a line is a static thing. Its synthesis, how·
ever, is successive and involves time. Strictly speaking,
nothing complex is merely intuited. Even the least com·
plexity is ascribed to synthesis. Combinatory activity-as·
sembling, integrating, collating, comparing, retaining, re·
trieving, reproducing, and, in general, synthesizing-is all
mental activity. Kant often says that we are not conscious
of these operations and some are even "concealed in the
depths of the soul," but this merely emphasizes that he
does think of them as mental processes. No one thinks oth·
erwise. It is inevitable, in Kant's system, that these activi·
ties be temporal activities and any materials involved in
these activities must be in time in order to be accessible for
synthesis.
It is for this reason that Kant confines the Schematism
to consideration of the temporality of intuition. The job of
the schematism is to bridge the gulf between the Catego·
ries as pure concepts of understanding and the empirical
sensibility that offers human beings matter for experience.
The Categories are developed from the forms of judgment
identified in formal logic. Although the transcendental deduction of the Categories is supposed to guarantee that
any reality we are able to experience will conform to these
pure concepts, the deduction does not reduce the merely
formal and logical significance of the Categories. Any ra·
tiona! creature will have experience in conformity with
just these twelve Categories, in Kant's view, but this might
have a wholly different meaning for creatures whose re·
ceptivity is not spatial and temporal as our receptivity is.
So the Schematism interprets the Categories for beings
with sensible and spatio-temporal intuitions. But Kant
seems to ignore the spatial altogether so that, in the Sche·
matism, as he describes it, the Categories are subjected to
a temporal condition. Some readers have supposed that he
might have offered a spatial as well as a temporal Sche·
matism for the Categories. This is not correct. The Gate·
gories are the pure forms that are available for the combination of materials provided by receptivity. Combination
is not intelligible without time. As Kant says, synthesis is
always successive, whether or not the manifold is succes·
sive or simultaneous. Thus Kant calls time the form of all
appearances whether inner or outer. In this view, Kant dis·
tinguishes appearances, which presuppose synthesis, from
intuitions, which do not. Outer intuitions have to be
re~represented as mental experiences in order to enter into
any combinatory activity. For example, the apprehension
of a cube offers an object of outer sense that has spatial
features such as being cube-shaped and no temporal fea·
tures. It is the visual experience of the cube and not the
cube itself that enters into mental activities. When spatial
things are re-represented they trade in their spatial charac·
ter for a new mental character. The visual experience of a
cube is not a cube-shaped experience. It is a datable event
related in time to all other events in the mind.
If outer sense is not directly available for synthesis, this
28
is just another way of saying that we cannot have any im·
mediate or non-inferential knowledge of outer things. The
raw materials of knowledge all have to be representations
in inner sense. But if this is so then in what sense are there
any data of outer sense at all? It seems that Kant's outer
sense has become something like the outer world for the
Cartesian-empiricist. It is a hypothetical source of some of
the data we really do have, namely, the things present to
the mind and available for synthesis. How else can we in·
terpret the fact that in Kant's scheme items that actually
possess spatial features cannot enter into mental processes
or consciousness. They have to be subjected to time. Kant
has internalized the problem of the external world. In or·
der to figure in mental activities, representations must be
temporal representations. When it comes to the supposed
data of outer sense, so often touted as immediate, it turns
out that subjection to time amounts to re-representation.
As Kemp-Smith put it, appearances in space are not really
representations at all, "They are objects of representation,
not representation itself" (Commentary, 295).
No spatial thing can exist as a subjective state. At most a
representation of a spatial thing, a representation which
does not itself have spatial features, can truly exist in the
mind. But the great problem with this is that the spatial is
now cut off from both the inner and mental and from the
metaphysically outer. From the perspective of the inner,
spatial representations are objects that have to be re-repre·
sented in time in order to belong to thought and to the
empirical world the mind constructs. From the perspective of things as they are in themselves, spatial representations are mere appearances. Spatial reality threatens to be·
come empirically ideal as well as being transcendentally ideal.
This instability in the status of the spatial sheds light on
some difficulties in interpreting Kant. Faced with the demand for a distinction between the subjective and the ob·
jective, Kant repeatedly formulates distinctions that seem
to fall entirely on the subjective side. For example, his con·
trast between judgments of perception and judgments of
experience, drawn in the Prolegomena, operates in a realm
that is all appearance. In the Analogies, he purports to dis·
tinguish the temporal order of our experience and the
temporal order in the object. But the only object under
consideration is outer appearance and not
mind~indepen~
dent reality. Such passages result from the fact that Kant
treats outer intuition as a source of input for inner intui~
tion. Then, relative to inner representations, the outer be-
comes a system of represented objects. Thus he is able to
treat outer appearances as if they offered independent objects about which a world of facts could be ascertained.
When he is thinking this way, Kant's conception of the
mind retreats to inner sense, to the traditional Cartesian
consciousness which has to develop knowledge of spatial
things through immediate contact with inner representa·
tions (ideas) of spatial objects. This thought contradicts
the claim on which much depends, in the Paralogisms, for
example, that inner and outer sense are symmetrical, and
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�both are immediate, and objects are given to both. In a
footnote which strengthens the newly composed "Refuta·
tion of Idealism," the Preface to the second edition of the
Critique explicitly asserts that the "permanent" which
must be found in perception "Cannot be an intuition in
me" (B xxxix) for intuitions in me have only the status of
ephemeral representations. Here Kant seems to promote
the object of outer sense, the object of perception, to
mind·independent reality, and simultaneously to reduce
our knowledge of it from the direct intuition claimed ear·
lier to something mediated and inferential.
We will miss what is important for Kant's thought here
if we treat these passages as mere slips into the Cartesian
point of view. The thought that what is permanent "can·
not be an intuition in me" points to an entirely different
significance for the inaccessibility of representations of
outer sense to both consciousness and synthesis. Why is it
that the permanent cannot be identified with any intui·
tion? Plainly, the answer is that anything truly mental, any
subjective state, is essentially transient. The fact that time
is the form of the mental guarantees that everything
purely mental has, as Hume expressed it, "a perishing exis-
tence." Nothing mental could possibly be permanent be·
cause impermanence is the form of mental things. Mere
temporal existence is impermanence.
We have now discovered the deeper Kantian motivation
for the sharp segregation of the temporal and the spa·
tial. Kant's thought of the outer has to satisfy two de·
mands that seem to conflict with one another. On the one
hand, he would like the outer to be intuited and thus im·
mediately accessible like any other intuition. And this is
required for the transcendental ideality of space. On the
other hand, he wants the outer as merely spatial, to be ex·
empted from the ever·vanishing essence of inner things
and mental things, even though the price of this exemp·
tion is separation from mental activities and consciousness. The inaccessibility of the spatial and its tendency to
become something independent of the mind is a conse·
quence of a powerful demand of Kant's theory and is no
mere slip. The defect of the Cartesian·empiricist perspec·
tive is that it envisions a starting point for philosophical
reflection consisting of a conscious mind confronted by
data all of which are perishing mental contents. Some·
thing outside the destructive scope of temporality must be
provided in order to account for the idea of the subject
himself. No concept of consciousness is intelligible which
starts from a framework limited to mental things.
The demand for something not subject to the ravages of
time, and therefore not mental, is the point of Kant's cen·
tral argument concerning apperception and personal iden·
tity. Any conception of mental activity presupposes that
the materials involved be accessible to one subject of con·
sciousness. The possibility of learning, discriminating, recognizing, remembering, and forming concepts requires
that the data be subject to one subject. But inner sense
does not reveal any such "abiding self."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Berkeley earlier noted that we have no idea of the sub·
ject of experience, and he provided the "notion" of a spirit
to make up for the missing idea. Hume, too, recognized
that we have no experience of the self. Refusing to intra·
duce an ad hoc surrogate like Berkeley's spirit, Hume tried
to reduce the subject of experience to the content of expe·
rience in his bundle theory of the subject. This amounted
to an extension to mental substances of Berkeley's bundle
theory of spatial substances. This is the gist of the history
of the problem of the unity of apperception up to Kant.
Kant takes the bundle theory of personal identity to be the
reductio ad absurdum of the Cartesian·empiricist program
which tries to derive everything from the purely mental,
purely inner, and purely temporal.
Kant insists on a substantial foundation for the unity of
the subject of experience outside the various experiences
of that subject. The great Kantian contribution here is the
recognition that the subject could not possibly be given in
experience. Hume said that when he looked within in or·
der to find himself he found instead only another percep·
tion (perishing mental content). Kant understands that
this is inevitable. Suppose we found a common element in
all our conscious experience and we inclined to think of
this ubiquitous element as our own abiding self. This
would have to be an error. Kant sees that no such element
in experience could be the foundation of the connected·
ness of experiences that makes them all contents for one
subject. On the contrary, experiences stand in just the
same need of connectedness to one another and presence
to a common subject whether or not they have a common
element of any kind. The very idea that I could note a
common element in my experiences presupposes that I, as
a single subject, have all those different experiences, so
that I might note a common element among them. The
common element, if there were one, could not be the rea·
son for the fact that all the experiences containing the com·
man element are mine. We have to look outside the realm of
conscious contents to find a foundation for the unity of
consciousness.
The nontemporal spatial object of outer sense offers a
foundation for permanence because it is not an essentially
perishing object. Of course, the spatial object is not the
sought.for subject of experience. But the nontemporal
outer object provides the minimal conceptual framework
for the idea of the endurance of the subject. Enduring
things in space introduce the "determinate time" within
which the endurance of the subject can be thought.
For in what we entitle "soul" everything is in continual flux
and there is nothing abiding except (if we must so express
ourselves) the "I", which is simple solely because its representation has no content .... [A 381]
So long, therefore, as we do not go beyond mere thinking we
are without the necessary condition for applying the concept
of substance, that is, of a self-subsistent subject, to the self as
a thinking being. [B 413]
29
�Now consciousness [of my existence] in time is necessarily
bound up with consciousness of the '[condition of the] possibility of this time determination; and it is therefore necessarily bound up with the existence of things outside me, as the
condition of the time determination. [B 276]
Endurance does not contradict the essential character of
things that are outside thought. This is the positive benefit
of the Kantian treatment of space as inaccessible to immediate consciousness. The subject cannot be intuited, nor
can it be constructed out of the flux of intuited contents.
It has a stability borrowed from the endurance of outer
things.
A natural objection to Kant's circuitous reasoning about
the subject of experience might run as follows: Consciousness, he says, reveals no enduring substantial subject. It
also reveals no enduring substantial object. The given,
construed as the totality of materials that the mind does
have to work with, entirely consists of perishing contents.
When Kant claims that the outer enduring object is required for the possibility of an inner enduring subject, it
seems that he merely assumes the possibility of the one in
order to provide a conceptual foundation for the other.
Why does he not just assume the existence of the substantial subject and confess that his procedure is really no
more realistic than that of Berkeley?
The essential difference between the inner and the
outer is supposed to furnish the Kantian response to this
objection. For no assumption that Kant could make within
an ontology limited to inner objects could possibly be efficacious just because it is the essence of the inner to be
perishing and insubstantial. Nothing mental endures because time is the form of the mental. So there can be no
question of assuming the endurance of something mental.
Furthermore, this opinion is not an arbitrary dogma. That
the contents of consciousness are essentially transient is
indisputable phenomenology.
The temporal is the realm of all contents of consciousness, so it looks as if we have to posit something nontemporal in order to introduce the least stability in our
thought of ourselves and the world. But Kant would like to
say that we do not have to posit anything because perception acquaints us with the spatial and with things that
have permanent existence in space. The first Analogy of
Experience asserts that our experience is necessarily of en-
during substances. To the extent that the discussion is not
entirely phenomenalistic and reductive, Kant seems to
identify the enduring component of what is perceived
with matter and to assimilate the assertion of the Analogy
to the conservation of matter. This is explicitly Kant's view
in the parallel discussion of the Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde. But there is another side of the idea of permanence that is less theoretical and sweeping and, perhaps,
more attractive.
Permanence requires, at a minimum, that the temporal
parameters of the object perceived be extended beyond
those of the perception of the object. Thus, the idea of
30
permanence is the idea of the existence of objects unperceived. It is this conception of permanence that furthers
Kant's realism. Commitment to permanence in perception is the idea that our perceptions are of relatively stable
objects which endure through gaps in our episodic experiences. Permanence expresses categorical opposition to the
thesis that esse is percipi.
We have seen that the very advantage of nontemporality carries with it the disadvantage of separation from consciousness and the need for re-representation. If we forget
about this problem for the moment, as Kant seems to, the
prospects for his theory are good. Time comes into the picture of spatial reality only via experience. As a re-representation, an experience of a spatial thing has a date, that is a
place in the sequence of all mental contents of a subject.
Nothing merely conceptual obstructs the possibility that
an identical outer thing could be experienced at two different times. This is just what cannot happen with inner objects. I can experience again today the object that I experienced yesterday, but I cannot have the experience I had
yesterday again today. At best, I can have a qualitatively
identical experience, never the numerically identical experience. For objects of inner sense, the date, that is, place in
temporal sequence, is part of the principle of individuation. Therefore, if experiences have different dates, they
are, ipso facto, different experiences. The enduring existence of things in space does not contradict the very essence of spatial existence, while to speak of the enduring
existence of things that exist only in time does contradict
the essence of such temporal things.
Once concepts of spatial enduring objects are given
footing, we are able to speak, as Kant says, of''determinate
time." The outer object exists when we perceive it. It endures between our perceptions of it. A clock is a reperceivable object with the help of which the time between
perceptual experiences is measured. The whole spatial
world is a generalized clock. It makes time determinate in
the sense that it makes it possible to say at just what time
our inner experiences occur. The endurance of the self
that must accompany all experiences is registered in the
objective temporal order of outer things. The dates of objects, clock time, place the whole inner sequence of experiences of objects in an objective context. This is Kant's
completion of his argument on apperception. Outer
things are essential for the temporal continuity of the subject of experience.
This argument appears in various relatively obscure formulations in the Transcendental Deduction, in the Paralogisms, and in the Refutation of Idealism. I have rehearsed
it here in order to emphasize the strategic importance for
Kant of the inaccessibility of the spatial from immediate
consciousness. Immediately accessible contents are essen-
tially transient. In Kant's most theoretical thinking, transience, like permanence, is pressed to the limit. Permanence means conservation of matter forever, and transience means that mental things are all new at each instant.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The least endurance that goes beyond the instantaneous
depends upon the powers of synthesis' ,and entails a mode
of existence that is not possible within the mind itself. Perhaps these extremes of permanence and transience are
not necessary for Kant's objectives. They seem to come
from a Leibnizean style of thinking about parts and wholes
and infinites that is familiar in the "Inaugural Dissertation" and in the Antinomies. In any case, the general line
of thought is crucial to Kant's philosophy as a whole. To
say this is not to say that he offers a consistent account of
the inner and the outer, the spatial and the mental, so that
his main contentions can be contemplated within the
equilibrium of a coherent and plausible system of concepts. There are inconsistencies which cannot be removed
while remaining faithful to Kant's overall thought because
they lie too deep and Kant's awareness of them is too
slight. Nonetheless, the basis of a generally Kantian reconstruction of most of what he says does seem to be possible.
7 A Sketch for the Consistent Kantian
We saw at the beginning of this essay that spatiality
seems to be equivalent to the locus of extra-mental existence in Kant's initial definition of outer sense in the Aesthetic. This interpretation gave way to an inner and mental status for space in light of the asserted transcendental
ideality of space and the idealist tendency of the claim that
space is only in us. The complete collapse of Kantian realism then seemed to be avoidable only if we could understand outer sensation rather than spatiality as the irreducible connection with mind-independent things. Whether
or not sensation supplies an adequate foundation for
Kant's realism, however, it is clear that the main argu~
ments of the Critique of Pure Reason require that spatiality carry with it an immunity from the transience of all
things of which time is the form. This brings to the fore
once again the identification of space with the region of
nonmental existence.
Failure to resolve strains here leaves Kant seeming to
assert that space is neither the metaphysically outer, since
it is only appearance, nor mental, since it is not subject to
the form of time. A satisfactory reconstruction must start
from the fact that this pressure for an intermediate status
that will bridge the gulf between the mind and the world
arises quite naturally. Some such bridge is, indeed, just
what is needed to overcome the solipsistic viewpoint and
attendant scepticism and idealism. At the same time we
obviously cannot leave space in an entirely unprovided-for
limbo between appearance and reality.
The concept of representation must do most of the gapclosing work. Although he is the champion of representation against the challenge of idealist reductions, Kant frequently yields to the idealist thought that representations
amount to a sort of impregnable epistemological shield
that perfectly protects an ever-virginal reality from the as·
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
saults of enquirers. Every passionate investigation is re-
pelled coldly and all aspiring lovers of truth only get to
know their own fantasies. There is something wrong here.
Representations are involved in all efforts to know anything. But this does not mean that representations block
knowledge from the outset by substituting a surrogate object. The idealist line about representation can be combated, in part, by shifting to use of the verb instead of the
noun. We represent reality as a stable system of relatively
stable material objects. It is reality that we thus represent.
We do not represent our own representations as such a sys·
tern. And, in any case, our representations certainly do not
compose such a system. Our representation of the world
is, itself, a thing of the mind and it has concepts and propositions and images for constituents, not relatively stable
material objects in space. If we resolve to defend Kant's
philosophy and we are asked, "Is reality spatia-temporal?"
we should not answer, as Kant himself often answers,
"Empirical reality is spatia-temporal, but mind-independent reality is not." That reply goes with the idea that our
representations are spatia-temporal and all we know about
are our representations. The right answer should be, "We
represent reality as a spatia-temporal system." This answer
does not change the subject and insist on speaking only
about representations. It is a guarded answer, but not a
negative answer about mind-independent reality. For the
question, "Is reality spatia-temporal?" the answer, "So we
represent it," is a form of affirmative answer. Its force is
very close to that of, "We certainly think so."
If we accept this reading of the relationship between
representation and reality, what are we to make of Kant's
claims that space is only an imposed form, and that space
is transcendentally ideal? The idea that space is a form
comes from Leibniz's analysis rejecting thinghood for
space. Formal status makes space a principle for the organization of simultaneous existants and denies that space
would be anything were there no such existants to be organized. This much does not impair the objectivity of
space. If space is a system of relationships among simultaneously existing outer things then spatial representation is
representation of the outer. Spatial things will be outer
things though space itself is not one of them. This seemed
to be Kant's view in the Metaphysical Exposition of space.
It is only because Kant also thinks of space as a form imposed by us that the spatial tends to become subjective and
ideal.
Why does Kant think that space is imposed by us and is
not a system of relations in which things would stand even
if we did not represent them at all? There are two reasons
for this. First, this conception enables him to explain some
synthetic a priori knowledge, as we saw in discussion of the
Transcendental Exposition. I will simply pass over this
presumed benefit of the ideality of space and will not consider here whether anything of that benefit could be retained if space were not regarded as an imposed system of
relations. However this is decided, we cannot suppose that
31
�Kant flatly asserts that space is imposed simply because
that will enable him to explain our knowledge of geometry
and its application to the world. He must have reasons for
thinking that this status is independently plausible. I want
to call attention to a set of convictions that operate in the
background of Kant's thinking, and sometimes in the fore·
ground. For example,
Those who take space and time for some real and absolutely
necessary fastening as it were of all possible substances and
states do not think that anything else is required in order to
conceive how to a number of existing things there applies a
certain original relation as the primitive condition of possible
influxes and the principle of the essential form of the universe. [Even if we grant it as much reality and necessity as we
can, space] . .. only represents the intuitively given possibility
of universal coordination. [The question remains] ... what is
the principle upon which this relation of all substances rests,
a relation which when seen intuitively is called space. (Inaug.
Diss., 16]
Here Kant is saying that we cannot simply accept space as
the order in which simultaneous existents stand. That ex·
istents stand in any order, that they are related to one an·
other in any way, requires an explanation beyond their
mere existence. "Simply because of their subsistence they
are not necessarily related to anything else ... " (Ibid., 17).
Things must already form a whole or a universe in order to
stand in any relations, even spatial relations. The imposed
character of space comes out of these thoughts without
reference to the explanatory fruitfulness of the idea of
mind imposed space vis-a-vis geometrical knowledge.
To give as much definition as possible to these elusive
thoughts, let us consider reality without worrying at all
about representation or knowledge for the moment. We
can conveniently take God's point of view, remembering
that it is one with which Leibniz and Kant sometimes
seem to have a certain familiarity. Suppose God creates a
planet. It will have all the contents and characteristics that
he has put into it. There will already be spatial relation·
ships between the parts of the planet, but the planet itself
will not be anywhere in space, for there is nothing with
which it is coordinated. Now let God create another
planet. He need not first create more space so that there
will be room for another planet. The fact that it does not
need creating is a reflection of the nonthing-like status of
space, and of its necessary availability. Let us imagine that
God makes the second planet larger and warmer than the
first. As soon as there is more than one thing, in addition
to the properties that each thing has, there will also be a
multiplicity of relations between things. All the relations
seem to have a secondary significance from the point of
view of ontology and creation. They do not place any de·
mands on the creative powers of God at all. A planet will
not have the features it does have unless God actively puts
those features into it in his creation of it. But the relations
do not require anything beyond the creation of the indi-
32
viduals with their features. In creating the second planet,
God does exactly what he would have done had he created
it first. And then it is, automatically, so to speak, some·
where with respect to the first planet, larger than the first,
and warmer than the first. The thought that relations obtain without being created is part of the Leibnizean claim
that relations are not real.
In order to connect this with our reconstruction of
Kant's thinking, we have to add the thought that relations,
and the ones constituting space in particular, have their
existence only in representation. To illustrate this we can
pursue our story of creation. In what sense is one planet
larger than the other, or located somewhere with respect
to the other? Each planet is itself. It has all its properties. It
exists exactly as it would if the other planet did not exist at
all, ignoring some physics. From the point of view of the
planet in itself, if we could speak of such a thing, "larger
than" or "located ... with respect to" do not enter into its
existence at all. Of course, God will know that one planet
has a certain size and the other a certain size. God will
know that one of these is greater than the other. This is
because the planets are assembled into a universe in God's
thought. That they manage to stand as constituents of
anything is mediated by thought.
·
The idea that relations are imposed is the idea that they
only obtain in the context of a surveying intellect or con·
sciousness which provides a connection between things
that would otherwise simply not stand in any relations at
all, even though the several things were to exist. This pat·
tern of thought is clearly visible in Kant's transcendental
psychology. In the absence of a mind whose survey relates
them planets would stand in unrelated isolation much like
the isolation and wholesale disconnectedness that Kant as·
cribes to elements of the unsynthesized manifolds of intui·
tion. Kant's demand for synthesis is not a matter of sup·
posing that the mind will not appreciate the relationships
between spatial things (that they form a triangle, for exam·
pie) without synthesis. On the contrary, they do not form a
triangle or anything else until they are synthesized, al·
though receptivity alone assigns them location. Unsynthe·
sized elements of intuition are simply not related to one
another at all, apart from the fact that synthesis can relate
them. The perceivable features that they have as geomet·
rica! configurations have being as a consequence of syn·
sis. In this context, in the transcendental psychology, Kant
is thinking of both elementary intuitions that need to be
related and of complex intuitions that represent related
things as mental items and not outer realities. But this
thought clearly instantiates the pattern that relativizes re·
lations to a surveying mind.
Quite apart from the issue of the mental status of spatial
things that Kant asserts in his theory of the mental con·
struction of spatial objects out of located but unextended
sensations, his claim that the several constituents of a spa·
tial thing only stand in spatial relations as a consequence
of synthesis is not valid within the terms of Kant's own
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�discussion. The fact that things are in space at all is as·
cribed to receptivity which gives a locati.on to the original
intuitions of outer sense. Kant says that all magnitude
comes from synthesis. But the mere concept of location
cannot be divorced from that of spatial relations in the way
in which Kant requires. We may think with Kant that no
ultimate original sensation is colored or otherwise sensu·
ous, and that the perceivability of the sensuous element in
perception comes from a mental aggregation of many unperceived constituents. We cannot, however, altogether
abandon the idea that the locations to which sensations
are assigned in receptivity are near and remote from one
another prior to synthesis. To withdraw this idea is to
drain the meaning from "location" altogether. Plainly a
certain manifold can be synthesized and perceived as a yellow surface only because many sensations with locations
near one another have similar representational character,
even though we are not conscious of that character on a
sensation-by-sensation basis. The whole doctrine that
traces geometry to receptivity would be lost if we could
not say that the results of a synthesis were significantly determined in advance by the relations between the locations to which the several synthesized sensations are assigned. There is, then, a plain sense in which synthesis
does not create objects with geometrical features out of
mere collections of unrelated sensations. At most, synthesis discovers the geometrical features of pre-existing systems of sensations. Borrowing Kant's own phrase, we
should say that the spatial object is not produced by the
synthesis in so far as its existence is concerned ("dem Dasein nach," A 92) but that the function of synthesis is only
to make it possible for us to know spatial things as objects.
Once we give up the idea that space is imposed by us we
can restate the main themes of Kant while allowing that
spatial things are independent of the mind. The mind contains only representations of spatial things. This is not a
disaster now that we have got clear of the thought that
knowledge by means of representations must be just
knowledge of those representations. Our representations
embrace our thought of the universe as a system of spatia-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
temporal, causally interconnected, material objects whose
existence does not depend on our thought. Kant surely
wants to make available the anti-idealist result of this externalization of the spatial. In the Paralogisms, for example, Kant says that each subject has his own private time
and that private times are only commensurable with one
another through the public time of spatial existence. Were
space mental, it would be as private as time and would offer no exit from egocentrism. The crucial arguments of the
Critique that we have outlined will be rescued by this understanding, since those arguments require that space be
nonmental while our spatial representations have their
place in the sequence of subjective states.
Whether this reconstruction involves the retraction of
the familiar Kantian claim that things in themselves are
unknown is still not clear, but perhaps it now seems far less
important. Our perceptual knowledge is all conditioned by
complex relationships that obtain between ourselves and
the things we perceive. As empiricists we believe that all
our knowledge is based on perceptual knowledge. If we
mean by knowledge of things in themselves, knowledge
that does not depend on any relations in which we stand to
what we know, then we have no knowledge of things in
themselves. Is there something from which we are, therefore, barred?
What are atomic theory, molecular biology, and radio astronomy telling us, if not about how things are in themselves, as opposed to how things appear? If this sort of
thing is not knowledge of things in themselves, then the
demand for such knowledge seems like the demand to
know what things would look like if there were no creatures with eyes. There may survive enough of a feeling
that there could be some kind of divine, wholly nonrelational grasp of reality to support the idea that there is
something that we cannot know in principle, because our
knowledge depends on relations. But I prefer Kant's
thought that the concept of a noumenon is only a negative
and limiting concept and not the concept of an unknowable reality at all.
33
�BLACK AND WHITE
The right hand of Rachmaninoff, in plaster,
Poses on the piano, exemplifying
Perpetual grasp of the imaginary
Orange. Above, the photograph of Chopin
Wearing his overcoat indoors, the face
Framed in protective jet, the nose connecting,
Like a phrase, the puzzled eyes and lips.
Hands are relaxed in power, but cuff conceals
That all of art's controlled by how you hold
The wrist. Witness another picture, where
With wrists exposed, white beauty and two Jews,
Subalterns on the strings, imparadise
Queen Carmen Sylva of Roumania.
They cut Tchaikovsky's coda, for the dirge
Was deemed indecorous at court. Her reign
Is now, the chaste survivor of the trio,
Retained to touch me weekly with her touch.
Aristocratic still at the piano,
Her fingers knotted, but her thumbs are spades
Or sugar spoons pressing upon my back
To plant the tones that only ghosts require
Of music eaten brown by Brazilian beetles.
I memorize the pulse. Repeated octaves
Refuse admission to the Fourth Ballade,
While in the kitchen, waiting as reward,
Kulitch that must be deftly sawn, not sliced,
And tea from the electric samovar.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
34
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The Media-Shield of the Utopians
RaelJean Isaac and Erich Isaac
Why are the media so susceptible to the views of groups,
whose assumption, often unstated, is that a perfect society
can be created? These are groups out of sympathy with
one or more of the traditional values of American society,
who, however, couch their appeals in terms of values that
Americans share and purposes they desire, to their credit,
to achieve: social justice, peace, a pollution-free and safe
environment, equality between races and sexes, the reduction of risk, greater control of the individual over the decisions that affect his life.
We call these groups utopians. Let it be said immediately, they are not a cabal of conspirators parcelling out
areas of action to different groups in a coordinated onslaught on American institutions. They come from diverse
backgrounds and traditions. Who are these utopians?
They are the leadership and professional staff of the
mainline Protestant denominations and their related organizations, including the National Council of Churches,
the umbrella body representing thirty-two Protestant and
Eastern Orthodox churches. They include the leaders of
almost all the peace groups, including the pacifist ones,
like the War Resisters League and the American Friends
Service Committee and those that, while not opposing all
forms of violence in principle, seek to reduce the risks of
war, like SANE, Clergy and Laity Concerned, Physicians
for Social Responsibility, etc. They are the intellectuals in
Rael Tean Isaac has written Israel Divided, Ideological Politics in the Jewish
State (Johns Hopkins University Press 1976) and Party Politics in Israel
(Longman 1981). She recently published an article, "Do You Know
Where Your Church Offerings Go?" in the Reader's Digest (January
1983). Erich Isaac teaches geography at the City College of the City University of New York.
The above article is adapted from a book, The Coercive Utopians, that
Regnery Gateway will publish in the fall.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a number of institutes and think tanks that have flourished
in the soil of so-called "revisionist history" which places
the blame for world tensions after World War II primarily
on the United States. They are found in a series of community action organizations like ACORN and National
Peoples Action. They are in government bureaucracies,
and have been especially attracted to agencies like the Department of Education, ACTION (in the Carter years) and
the now defunct Community Services Administration,
most of whose personnel have been transferred to other
agencies. They are prominent in the legally independent
but wholly government-funded Legal Services Corporation and in the similarly constituted Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They are found in the environmental
movement, especially in newer national organizations like
Friends of the Earth and Environmental Action, and in
the host of local environmental groups which, spurred by
the issue of nuclear energy, have burgeoned around the
country. They are found in the consumer organizations established by Ralph Nader. They are found in the colleges,
and are particularly prominent in the law and social science faculties of elite universities.
These movements-if not the specific organizationsare familiar to the reader, for they are the daily fare of
press and television. Yet much of what they say in their
own publications would be surprising, even shocking to
the general reader. But the media have acted as a filter,
screening out most of the information that could damage
the utopians in the public view.
There are a number of factors that explain why the media, instead of providing the public with some perspective
on the utopians, have made themselves a sounding board
for them, absorbing and transmitting their perspective on
crucial issues as objective "truth." The most important is
that journalists have a broadly similar perspective on the
major issues the utopians address. Journalist Robert Novak
35
�(of the Evans and Novak column) has called the media the
setting where journalists, regardless of background, are
welded into one homogeneous ideological mold.l Thomas
Shepard, the publisher of Look Magazine until it folded in
1971, noted that with only a handful of exceptions the
men and women who produced Look "detested big business" and "worshipped the ecological and consumerism
reformers. " 2
While these observations are impressionistic, they are
confirmed by surveys of the media elite. Two political scientists, S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, in 1979
and 1980 interviewed 240 journalists and broadcasters of
the most influential media outlets. The survey found the
media elite were markedly to the left of the American electorate as a whole. For example, over a sixteen-year period
less than twenty percent of the media elite had supported
any Republican Presidential candidate. Their views on issues were in striking agreement with utopian articles of
faith. For example, fifty-six percent of the media elite
agreed that the U.S. exploits the Third World and is the
cause of its poverty.l
The media also have an ambition to hold sway over society in common with the utopians. In response to questions
from Lichter and Rothman, both the media elite and a
comparative sample of the business elite had a very similar
perception of the actual power of different groups in society, seeing the media, business, and unions as those with
the greatest influence. But asked how they would prefer to
see power distributed, the media elite put themselves at
the top, followed by consumer groups, intellectuals, and
blacks. 4
In part the media elite sympathize with the utopians because they define their role in much the same way. Walter
Cronkite is said to have asserted that journalists identify
with humanity rather than with institutions or with authority.s Similarly Julius Duscha, a reporter who became
director of the Washington Journalism Center, said "Reporters are frustrated reformers ... they look upon themselves almost with reverence, like they are protecting the
world against the forces of eviJ."6
For all their cynicism concerning tile motives of busi~
nessmen and politicians, the media elite readily succumb
to hero worship. Ralph Nader was the journalist's image of
his highest self: his own man, in the pay of no institution,
he acted without reference to financial self-interest. Nader
was the true outsider, an almost monastic figure, with his
spare single room lodgings, his bachelorhood and abstemious way oflife. No single figure has captured the imagination of journalists in quite the same way, but the utopians
as a whole benefit from being viewed by journalists as people like themselves, representatives of all the people.
In the case of some of the media elite more than sympathy is involved. Some are utopians, sharing fully their perspective on events. Larry Stern, in a key position as national news editor of the country's second most influential
paper, the Washington Post, shared their attitudes. This
36
emerged, surprisingly, at his funeral, following his sudden
death in 1980 at the age of fifty of a heart attack. He was
eulogized by left-wing journalist I. F. Stone, who praised
Stern as a friend of Palestine and Nicaragua (i.e. the PLO
and the Sandinistas) and for hating "those huge mindless
institutions that devour our substance and corrupt our
fundamental ideals, like the Pentagon and the CIA."7
(More remarkably, Stern was also eulogized by Teofilo
Acosta, head of the Cuban interests section in Washington, identified by intelligence expert Robert Moss as station chief of the DGI, the Cuban intelligence service.
Stern was apparently a friend of Castro's Cuba as well.)
Journalist Les Whitten, who worked with Jack Anderson
on the popular column, seems to have derived his political
philosophy directly from Ralph Nader. He warned a high
school graduating class in Maryland of the "great piratelike corporations that swallow up the blood of the people"
and informed the class that if you lined up the presidents
of thirty big banks and thirty bank robbers you would have
fifty-eight criminals and the only difference was that one
kind did it with a gun quickly while the bank presidents
did it "at eighteen percent a year without a gun." 8
Many in the media-including some of the elite-actually learned their craft in utopian training-grounds. A huge
((underground," later called ualternative" press, bur·
geoned in the late 1960s, its theme that America (often
spelled with a "k" wrapped in a swastika) was a fascist
country. A number of jounalists from these papers subsequently moved into the straight press. The best-selling
novel The Spike described the odyssey of a reporter for
Barricades (an obvious takeoff on the "alternative" journal
Ramparts), whose sensational scoop exposing the CIA
earns him a place on the New York World (clearly the New
York Times). The Spike's hero Robert Hackney was pre·
sumably modelled on New York Times star reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote for Ramparts before coming to the
New York Times and made his name exposing the CIA. To
be sure, only the first part of Hersh's career paralleled that
of the fictional Hackney, for while Hackney woke up to
the role he was playing on behalf of Soviet disinformation
efforts, there is no evidence that Hersh's utopian perspective has changed.
Even journalists who do not start out as utopians may be
drawn to them because their concerns make good copy.
Utopians are endless sources of the kind of stories that sell
papers. Our tuna is poisoned; the nuclear plant near our
city is in danger of meltdown; nuclear bombs will destroy
all life from ground zero, which is in our backyard. In addition to the inherent drama of scare stories, these stories
have, as the utopians present them, an appealing clarity.
There are good guys and bad guys, victimizers and victims.
This is much more dramatic stuff than cost benefit analyses, probability studies, and theories of deterrence necessary to refute these stories. Moreover, the utopians have
solutions: shut down nuclear power plants, eliminate all
pesticides, rely on the sun, endorse a nuclear freeze.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�If stories told according to utopian formula make good
copy for the press, they are even bett~r suited for documentaries, television's method of exploring issues indepth. Why this is so can be seen from .a candid look into
the documentary producer's world offered in 1978 by Martin Carr, a veteran in producing documentaries for all
three networks. Carr noted that the producer's first step
was to "arrive at a point of view." His goal was to make the
viewer feel as he felt: "If you walk away feeling differently,
I failed somehow." Carr noted the obligation to provide
"balance," but explained that this had to be done carefully, so as not to disturb the documentary's emotional impact. He described a documentary he had made on migrant workers in which, for balance, he had interviewed
the biggest grower in F1orida. But he was a charming man
who could have tipped the emotional balance of the documentary in favor of his position. So he found another
grower whose point of view was the same, but whose personality would alienate the viewer and put him on instead.
As a result Carr reports: "One could only feel a particular
way at the end of the film ... the way I felt about it." 9 The
utopian point of view on most stories shapes visually striking, emotionally compelling documentaries: the good
farmworker against the bad grower; the victims of disease
versus the large corporation; the peasant guerilla against
government-backed exploiters, etc.
On major topics such as the environment, defense, intelligence, and foreign policy, the media serve as a vast
sounding board for the utopians, while at the same time
suppressing sounds the utopians prefer not to hear. Suppression is especially important, for while there is dispute
on how effective the media are in making the public think
the way journalists do (after all, the public does not vote
like the media elite), there is little dispute that the media
determine what it is that the public thinks about. An article in The Journalism Quarterly points out: "If newsmen
share a pattern of preference as to what is newsworthy,
and that pattern does not represent reality, they will
present a distorted image of the world which may contribute to inappropriate decisions and policies."lO
Nowhere are distortions in coverage more evident than
in coverage of environmental issues, particularly nuclear
energy, the issue on which the utopians have expended
their greatest efforts. The impact of the utopian campaign
against nuclear energy on the media is apparent from two
systematic studies, one by the Battelle Center and one by
the Media Center. The Battelle Center study covered four
national periodicals, including the New York Times, from
1972 to 1976 and found that while in 1972 there were more
positive than negative statements on nuclear energy, by
1976 negative outnumbered positive statements by two to
one.ll (This, it must be remembered, was three years prior
to Three Mile Island.) The Media Institute study focussed
on ten years of television evening news coverage, from Au-
gust 4, 1968 to March 27, 1979 (Just prior to Three Mile
Island). Its most telling finding concerned the "experts"
,TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
used by the networks on nuclear energy. Of the top ten
sources used over the years, seven were opposed to nuclear power. The source most frequently used was the
antinuclear Union of Concerned Scientists, the second
Ralph Nader. 12 After Three Mile Island earlier tendencies
became even more marked. Psychiatrist Robert DuPont
examined 13 hours of videotapes of news coverage on nuclear energy and found that fear was the leitmotif of the
stories. Reporters continually examined what DuPont
called jjwhat if, worst case" scenarios. He found almost no
mention of the risks posed by other energy sources or of
the need to balance risks.ll
·
By 1982 the pattern of media coverage had produced serious misconceptions in the American public concerning
the balance of opinion among scientists on nuclear energy.
A Roper poll found that almost one in four Americans believed that a majority of scientists "who are energy experts" opposed the further development of nuclear energy. One in three members of the public believed that
solar energy could make a large contribution to meeting
energy needs within the next twenty years.l 4 An actual
survey of energy experts, however, showed that only five
percent wanted to halt further development of nuclear energy (among those with specific expertise in the nuclear
area none wanted to halt further development). No more
than two percent of energy experts saw any form of solar
energy making a substantial contribution to energy needs
in the next twenty years.l5
The distortions in perception can be explained by the
views of science jounalists, who are far more sceptical of
nuclear energy than scientists. A survey by Lichter and
Rothman of science journalists at major national media
outlets found there was a fascinating, though scarcely surprising, connection between attitudes toward nuclear energy and political ideology. The more liberal the journalist,
the more likely he was to oppose nuclear energy. Indeed
Rothman and Lichter found they could define the issue
more precisely. "We asked them a large number of social
and political questions. The best predictor of opposition to
nuclear energy is the belief that American society is unjust."l6 Moreover, Lichter and Rothman found that television reporters and producers were even more hostile to nuclear energy than print journalists.
The extensive use, especially by television, of the Union
of Concerned Scientists was presumably a major factor in
explaining the discrepancy between what scientists think
and what the public thinks they think. The public, because of its name, perceived this as an organization of sci-
entists. But as Samuel McCracken points out in The War
Against the Atom, its membership is obtained through direct mail solicitation of the public and the only qualification for belonging is a contribution of $15. Its executive
directors in recent years have not been scientists_17 How
many members of the Union of Concerned Scientists are
in fact scientists? The organization keeps silent, but a random sample of 7,741 scientists turned up only one who
37
�was affiliated with the Union of Concerned Scientists. On
that basis Lichter and Rothman estimate that fewer than
200 scientists among the 130,000 listed in American Men
and Women of Science are affiliated with the Union of
Concerned Scientists. IS Little wonder that the organization refused Lichter and Rothman information needed to
poll its membership!
McCracken observes that anyone would see the fraud if
a general membership organization composed almost entirely of laymen and concerned principally with supporting bans on prayer in the schools were to call itself the
Union of Concerned Clergymen_l9 Yet the media persist in
using this organization of utopians, which misuses data as
it misuses the title of "scientist," as its chief authority on
nuclear energy. The media rarely call upon Scientists and
Engineers for Secure Energy, although this is an organization whose members are genuine experts on nuclear en·
ergy and includes seven nobel laureates in physics. Presumably this is because it does not spread the utopian's
message, endorsed by so many in the media, that nuclear
power is immensely dangerous and the authorities are deceiving the public.
Another interesting insight into the weight of sentiment
against nuclear power in the media comes from a Public
Broadcasting Company spokesman who was castigated for
the uniform imbalance of the PBC's programs. He explained that it would be difficult even to find a producer
prepared to do a pro-nuclear film. zo
On questions of defense, the media elite have also supported utopian assumptions. Walter Cronkite summed up
the media perspective in the 1970s in 1974: "There arealways groups in Washington expressing views of alarm over
the state of our defenses. We don't carry those stories. The
story is that there are those who want to cut defense
spending." 21 The American Security Council, which during the 1970s issued reports and ran a series of conferences
and seminars featuring defense experts who warned of the
disrepair of the American military and the massive Soviet
military buildup then going on, became convinced that
there was some unwritten rule in the media not to cover
their activities. But for the media, as a group advocating
increased defense expenditures the American Security
Council was simply not unews.n
Survey results indicate how pervasively media coverage
reflected utopian attitudes. Ernest Lefever, before starting
his own Ethics and Public Policy Center, led a study team
for the Institute for American Strategy which examined
CBS News coverage of national defense for 1972 and
1973. The study showed that during that two-year period
the viewer saw only one minute on the "CBS Evening
News" dealing with the comparative military strength of
the U.S. and U.S.S.R. 22 The study found that 1,400 presentations on the subject of national defense tended to
support the view that threats to our security were less serious than the government thought while only seventy-nine
contradicted that position.
38
With Reagan's victory, the views of those who argued
for more defense spending could no longer be ignored, for
those views represented administration policy. In response, CBS entered the debate with a massive documentary designed to counter the administration position in
June 1981. Described by its anchorman, Dan Rather, as
"the most important documentary project of the decade,"
the five-hour series, "The Defense of the United States,"
was hailed by the Washington Post as the "first documentary epic in TV history." Its theme was that "the United
States is not threatened by any external enemy, but rather
by the tragic propensity of the two superpowers each to
see in the other a mirror reflection of its own fears and
hostilities." Joshua Muravchik and John E. Haynes noted
that in the five hours devoted to examining plans for a
U.S. military build-up, "there was not mention-none-of
the Soviet build-up which precipitated it."2l
Although the public had no way of knowing it, the program's arguments, experts, even its vocabulary were de·
rived from the utopian organizations. To testify that current defense spending was already excessive the program
used "experts" Jack Geiger and Kosta Tsipis. Tsipis is a
member of the board of directors of SANE and Geiger is a
leader of both Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
(in which Soviet physicians join with American physicians
to emphasize the need for the U.S. to disarm). Geiger was
identified only as professor of medicine at the City University of New York and Tsipis as professor of physics at
MIT. 24 The viewer was not informed that they were peace
movement activists.
To show that Soviet influence was already on the decline (and increased defense expenditures, presumably, superfluous), CBS drew on the Center for Defense Information that had issued a report in 1980 purporting to show
that Soviet influence in the world had reached an all-time
low. After Defense Secretary Weinberger spoke of the
need for a strong defense, Walter Cronkite undercut his
statement: "Since 1960, the Soviet influence around the
world actually has declined. Their so-called gains like Afghanistan and Angola take on a different perspective, particularly when measured against losses, like Egypt and
China." CBS then offered a closeup of two lists of twelve
nations, one showing Soviet gains and the other Soviet
losses since 1960. The lists were erroneous but repeated
the errors in the lists published by the Center for Defense
Information.25 The voice of the Center for Defense Information had been transformed into the voice of CBS.
The very vocabulary of the program was derived from
the utopians. The process of arms procurement was referred to as "The Iron Triangle," after the title of a book
recently released by the utopian Council on Economic Priorities. Its author, Gordon Adams, was president of the
Corporate Data Exchange, a new-left research organization started by the Institute for Policy Studies. The book
had been financed, among others, by the IPS mainstay,
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the Samuel Rubin Foundation. The importance of a term
like "The Iron Triangle" is that it not only conveys a
meaning but an emotional impact. "The Iron Triangle" is
bad. It links the government, the armed forces, and industries that produce military equipment in a closed bond of
steel and. mutual interest against the rest of us.
The utopian campaign•against the intelligence agencies
depended heavily on the media for its success. 11he ·campaign began in the .Jate 1960s, when a series of'books and
articles began to appear, many of them financed 'by the
FuNd for Investigative journalism. The Fund was established by Philip M. Stern, whose 'Stern Fund is a major
furrder of utOpian:projects.' But it scored its first major success when:the NewWork Times• ran a series of articles by
Seymour' Hersh in December 1974 exposing CIA involve.ment in illegal tlornestic surveillance of the anti-war movement. Thisrprecipitated a series of investigations by the
'5\J<fcially appointed Rockefeller Commission and the Sen~te,•·which resulted in "reforms" that went far beyond correction of abuses. The CIA's ability to function in crucial
areas was imperiled. At one point eight committees of
Congress, the armed services, foreign relations, appr<Jpiiations and intelligence committees of both houses, had 'to
be informed of every major CIA operation, which, given
the all-but-certainty ofleaks by staff, meant there could be
no such operations.
The U.S. intelligence agencies were a legitimate subject
of media interest. The problem, however, was that in true
utopian fashion the media were interested only in stories
that revealed intelligence activities as illegal or immoral.
Reports that the intelligence services were failing to perform their task of protecting U.S. citizens were not news.
The major media ignored a conference called "Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis," held by the Coalition for Peace
through Strength in March 1979. There were revelations
at this conference that the public might have thought dramatic. For instance, the Secret Service only received one
fourth of the intelligence it received before the media-assisted llreforms" of intelligence agencies discouraged in·
formants who feared Freed om of Information requests
would expose their identities. It thus had to recommend
that the President not visit certain cities in the United
States. The conference also disclosed that the Federal Employment Security program had been undone: members
of the Communist Party or even of the Weather Underground were no longer barred from federal employment,
even in sensitive positions.Z6 The media showed no interest in informing the public about the necessary services
intelligence agencies provide or about the consequences
of dismantling security protections.
With all the popularity of documentaries about the malfeasances of the CIA and FBI, the networks produced
nothing comparable on the KGB. This was not because
the topic could not be handled. A Canadian team did an
absorbing documentary called "The KGB Connections"
based largely on the testimony of KGB defectors. A great
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
critical success in Canada and Europe, it was turned down
by all three networks, including ABC which had invested
in its production. Challenged for its failure to show the
documentary, ABC countered that it would shortly be
showing its own documentary on the KGB but at this writ;ing, a year later, ABC has not done so. The failure to exam'ine KGB activities by both TV and print media meant, as
James Tyson points out in Target America, that the CIA
seemed to shadow-box against a non-existent enemy. The
utopian contention that covert intelligence activities were
the product of deviant psychologic~] needs of those who
manned corrupt American institutions was reinforced.
Foreign policy, particularly as it touches •0TI human
rights, is yet another area in which the media .alm0st uniformly presents the utopian perspective. Thereason'is not
simply that journalists share that perspective, although
doubtless many do. Covering human rights violations in
totalitarian "socialist" aollntries :is <lifticult, if not impossible, for journalists. S1i1dh·cotnitriies, •when they do not bar
jounmalists :alt0gether, <Control their movements. This
-meams •that information has to come from people outside
'the·coutitry. Information was available on the Cambodian
genocide very early from people who had escaped over the
border. By 1977 Reader's Digest editors John Barron and
Anthony Paul had produced a book Murder of a Gentle
Land which, based on the eye-witness accounts of hundreds of escapees, estimated that between April 17, 1975
and the end of 1976, at least 1.2 million people had died as
a result of the policies of the Cambodian government.
Yet press coverage of events unprecedented in horror
since the Nazi destruction of six million Jews was minimal.
In 1976, the year in which Barron and Paul conducted
their interviews, television network evening news programs mentioned events in Cambodia only three times.
NBC never mentioned them at all. The country's two
most influential papers, the Times and the Washington
Post, together mentioned the subject a total of 13 times.27
In 1977, when what was happening was even clearer, the
three networks had a combined total of two stories. That
contrasted with !59 human rights-related stories on the
networks on South Africa. 28 While the New York Times
did better in 1977, referring to the Cambodian genocide
34 times, this still contrasted sharply with 291 stories of
human rights violations in South Africa. The Washington
Post ran ten items on Cambodia. It had thirty items just on
the death of Steve Biko, the black leader who died under
suspicious circumstances in a South African jail. 29 In 1978
the American Security Council made things convenient
for the press corps by arranging a press conference in
Washington D.C., addressed by Pin Yathay, a civil engineer who had escaped after 26 months in Communist
Cambodia. Yathay reported losing 18 members of his family and provided an eye-witness account of desperation
and cruelty:
And there were many macabre incidents ... the starving peo-
ple who ate the flesh of dead bodies during this acute famine.
39
�I will now tell you a story that I lived myself ... a teacher who
ate the flesh of her own sister. She was later caught, she was
beaten from morning to night until she died, under the rain,
in front of the whole village as an example, and her child was
crying beside her, and the mother died at the evening. 30
A dramatic story. But not one of the networks sent a representative. The Washington Post sent a reporter, but the paper never carried a story.
Hedrick Smith, a one-time Moscow correspondent of
the New York Times and then chief correspondent of the
Washington Bureau, has cast light on why the coverage
was so poor. He noted that the Times-the "bible" of the
other media, in the words of a news executive, was not in~
dined to do stories on foreign countries written outside
them.ll Soviet dissidents in the Soviet Union were the sub·
ject of many stories. Once the same people had found ref·
uge in the United States, they found the press uninterested in their accounts of human rights violations. When
leading figures in the Soviet human rights movement like
Vladimir Bukovsky and Alexander Ginzburg participated
in two days of International Sakharov Hearings in 1979
that brought sixty witnesses to Washington to testify, their
efforts were virtually ignored by the press. The Washington Post ran a story in the "Style" section called "Remembering Russia." That was scarcely the point of the hearings. Similarly, when testimony on conditions in Vietnam
was given before a House subcommittee in June 1977, including eyewitness reports of a Vietnamese imprisoned in
a series of "reeducation camps," the major newspapers
carried nothing.l2
The end result is gross distortion in coverage of human
rights problems. In 1977 the New York Times carried fortyeight items on human rights violations in South Korea and
none on North Korea.ll More than that, as Reed Irvine,
head of the media watchdog group, Accuracy in Media, has
pointed out, a kind of collaboration emerges between the
U.S. media and the countries that most systematically violate human rights.l4.
There may have been an additional reason for the reluctance of the media to report more fully on Cambodia and
Southeast Asia. In the last years of the Vietnam War the
press was an adversary of the war and they were at first
unwilling to believe, later to acknowledge, that the American departure did not lead to an improved life for the people
of that area. For example, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, urging a cutoff of American aid on March 17,
1975, wrote: "Whatfuture possibility could be more terrible
than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now?"
The possibilities were beyond anything of which Anthony
Lewis dreamed. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker in
the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War was glad to
give the press credit for forcing the U.S. out of the region.
Once, however, there were boat people and millions of
murdered victims in Cambodia, the press did not want to be
reminded of its role. The violent reaction of CBS newsman
40
Morley Safer to an article by Robert Elegant in Encounter in
August 1981 is revealing. Once himself a journalist in Vietnam, Elegant laid bare the shabbiness of the reporting, not
exempting himself from the criticism. Safer devoted a radio
segment to denouncing Elegant, whose article almost none
of his listeners could have seen, as worthy of the mantle of
Joseph Goebbels.l5 The entire subject obviously irritated
media nerves.
Coverage of human rights thus adhered to the utopian
perspective according to which the world's worst human
rights violator was the Union of South Africa, followed by
third world countries friendly to the United States, espe·
dally those in Latin America. As countries came under at·
tack from internal subversion backed directly or indirectly
by the Soviet Union, media focus, in true utopian fashion,
was on the injustices that lead people to revolt rather than
the predictable consequences of these "wars of liberation"
in inaugurating much more repressive regimes. Karen de
Young, now foreign editor of the Washington Post, who
from Nicaragua provided warm coverage of the Sandinistas
in Somoza's last period, admitted: "Most journalists now,
most Western journalists at least, are very eager to seek out
guerrilla groups, leftist groups, because you assume they
must be the good guys. 36 Walter Cronkite, speaking in Portland, said the U.S. should help countries such as El Salvador
"achieve their goals even if it means interim steps of social~
ism and communism."l7 (As Reed Irvine pointed out, communism has yet to serve as an "interim step.")
With rare exceptions-NBC in the fall of 1982 produced
a film "What Ever Happened to El Salvador" that accompanied a Salvadoran army unit on patrol rather than the guerrillas-network documentaries have been hostile to the
government of El Salvador. In September 1982, a CBS documentary focussed on the inevitability of revolution in
Guatemala as a response to tyranny backed by the United
States on behalf of our exploitative business interests. Television journalists, however, bend over backwards in their
efforts to understand the difficulties of the Nicaraguan government. A segment on ABC's "20/20" aired in June 1980
had David Marash make the patently false declaration:
uNicaragua's revolutionary justice system has been given
near unanimous international praise."
The utopian influence on public television is even
greater than on the networks. On public television they
often write and produce the documentaries. For example,
Philip Agee was part owner of an anti-CIA three-hour docu·
mentary "On Company Business" broadcast in May 1980.
The fund-raising prospectus sent out by the producers prior
to the actual filming promised that the documentary would
"show the broken lives, hatred, cruelty, cynicism, and despair which result from U.S.-CIA policy" and that it would
record "the story of 30 years of CIA subversion, murder,
bribery, and torture as told by an insider and documented
with newsreel film of actual events."l8
The "insider" who served as the documentary's central
figure and moral hero was Agee, identified for the viewer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�only as someone who had worked for the CIA between 1959
and 1969. There was no mention of Agee's role in exposing
the identities of U.S. agents worldwide or of his expulsion
from the Netherlands, France, and England. Intelligence
expert Robert Moss has revealed Agee was found to have
met with the Cuban intelligence station chief in London at
least 30 times before he was expelled from England. If the
viewer had known of Agee's record, he might have discounted everything Agee said. The documentary's solution
was to keep silence. Despite this, Public Broadcasting's director of current affairs programming Barry Chase de·
scribed the program in a memo to all public broadcasting
stations as "a highly responsible overview of the CIA's his·
tory." 39 (Chase clearly did not feel inhibited by the law es·
tablishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that
stipulates programs funded by it must be objective and bal·
anced if they deal with controversial issues.)
The Institute for Policy Studies' Saul Landau has written
films for public television of a similar calibre. "Paul Jacobs
and the Nuclear Gang" (with part of its seed money from
the Samuel Rubin Foundation and Obie Benz, one of the
wealthy young creators of the Robin Hood was Right spe·
cies of foundations 40 ) was a polemic against nuclear energy
and nuclear weapons, relying primarily on emotionally
charged interviews with cancer victims who believed their
disease had been caused by radiation and with the members
of their families. Landau also wrote "From the Ashes ...
Nicaragua," directed by Helena Solberg Ladd, who had
been a lecturer at IPS. William Bennett, Head of the National Endowment for the Humanities which had chan·
neled funds for the film's production under its previous
head, on seeing the film remarked that he was "shocked,
appalled, disgusted" by such an example of "unabashed
socialist-realism propaganda." 41 Author Midge Deeter, ex·
ecutive director of the Committee for a Free World, found
this description too mild: "We almost no longer have a
working vocabulary to cover phenomena like Ms. Ladd's
film."42
Many of the documentaries that appear on public television endorse utopian themes far more overtly than would
be possible on the networks. Public Broadcasting presented
a film on North Korea that could have received the imprimatur of its dictator Kim 11 Sung; a hymn to Cuba called
"Cuba: Sports and Revolution;" two films on China, "The
Children of China" good enough propaganda to win the
praise of the Chinese Central Broadcasting Administration for helping American People "understand the New
China," and "China Memoir" produced by Shirley MacLaine, which even Ralph Rogers, then chairman of the
Public Broadcasting Corporation, admitted was "pure
propaganda."4l Boston Public Television's WGBH funded
a film called "Blacks' Britannica" on British racism, which
won the prize at the Leipzig Film Festival in East Germany.
This was too much even for the producer at WGBH who
complained of the film's "endorsement of a Marxist point
of view."44 When he sought to edit out some of the most
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
blatant segments, the maker of the film brought suit and
the U.S. Communist Party front, the National Alliance
Against Racist and Political Repression, petitioned to join
the suit.45 In the end four minutes of the film were removed, but its Marxist message remained unmistakable.
Another utopian theme-hostility against corporations-is also reflected in the media. A Louis Harris poll in
the fall of 1982 found that an "overwhelming seventy-six
percent" of high level executives believed business and financial coverage on TV news was prejudiced against business.46 The hostility is most pervasive in a surprising areaentertainment programming. A Media Institute study
"Crooks, Conmen and Clowns" found that the image of
businessmen on TV series was overwhelmingly negative,
with two out of three businessmen on two hundred prime
time episodes shown as foolish, greedy, or criminal. While
on occasion a small businessman was shown in a favorable
light, those running big businesses were for the most part
depicted as actual criminals.47
While it might be argued that the businessman simply
offers a convenient "heavy" in plot development, Ben
Stein, in The View from Sunset Boulevard, shows that
there is an excellent fit between the opinions of TV writers and producers and the shows they create. Stein interviewed forty writers and producers of the major adventure
shows and situation-comedies and found that even those
worth millions of dollars considered themselves workers
opposed to an "exploiting class." A typical flippant-serious
comment was made by Bob Schiller, who wrote for Lucille
Ball for 13 years and produced "Maud." He said of businessmen, "I don't judge. I think there are good lepers and
bad lepers."48 Producer Stanley Kramer told Stein: Everything that has to do with our lives is contaminated. The
air, the streams, the food-everything is ruined." 49 That
big business was responsible was self-evident to most TV
writers.
To the media the utopians are inherently more believable than those who oppose them. Cynical about human
motives, journalists seem unable to conceive that "public
interest" spokesmen act from anything but selfless devotion to the public good. Abbie Hoffman could enlighten
them: "There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and
winning."50 Peter Metzger has pointed out another motivation that also has to do with heightening the individual's
sense of power and self-worth. With only a few exceptions
the experts cited by the utopians never made genuine scientific contributions and thus were denied the reward
of recognition by their peers.5 1 They have achieved the
fame and status their scientific work could not gain for
them through serving the utopians' need for men with
credentials.
Mesmerized by the utopians' simple-minded reading of
human nature, journalists are quick to denigrate critics of
utopian orthodoxies. For example, CBS produced a documentary attacking cereal-makers for the high sugar con-
41
�tent of many of their products. (Dan Rather asked a General Foods vice-president if he could sleep at night, given
the damage he was doing to the children of America.) In
pursuit of the requisite "balance" the program interviewed a leading professor of nutrition at Harvard, who denied the cereals did the harm alleged in the rest of the program. The camera simply zoomed in on a plaque on a
Harvard building which indicated that it had been built
through a donation by General Foods.5 2 However effective the visual in undercutting the professor's statement, a
faulty understanding of the reward system in science was
revealed. For scientists, the most important factor in determining career opportunities is the judgment of their
peers, not the approval of company executives who make
charitable contributions to universities.
Journalists are ready to believe the most improbable
charges against institutions they distrust. In January 1982
the New York Times featured a lengthy story by Raymond
Bonner concerning events~ alleged to have taken place a
year earlier: American military advisers in El Salvador had
observed a torture training session for the El Salvadoran
military in which a seventeen-year-old boy and a thirteenyear-old girl had their bones broken prior to being killed.
Bonner's sole source for the story was a deserter from the
Salvadoran army. The narrative that in its original form
claimed that the American advisers were teaching the torture session, had appeared in a leftist Mexican paper but
was such obvious Communist atrocity propaganda that it
took eight months after the original publication before a
taker was found among American journalists, Mr. Bonner,
who offered a ((sanitized" version in the Times. 53
Such credulity leaves the media open to being taken in
by the grossest "disinformation" forgeries. F1ora Lewis, at
the top of her profession as a columnist for the New York
Times, accepted uncritically a supposed State Department
"dissent document," distributed to newsmen by the
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, one of the utopian think
tanks devoted to Latin America, and co-founded by Orlando Letelier, probably "an agent of influence" for the
Cuban government. While the State Department does indeed have a "dissent channel" permitting members in disagreement with policy to have their objections heard at
the highest level of the department, the document F1ora
Lewis accepted as authentic bore the name of a non-existent State Department task force. Lewis devoted her
column of March 6, 1981, to the document that attacked
U.S. government policy in El Salvador. Asserting it had
been "drawn up by people from the National Security
Council, the State and Defense Departments, and the
CIA," she praised the report's "solid facts and cool analysis" and closed by telling the Reagan administration that it
would "do well to listen to the paper's authors before the
chance for talks is lost."
At this point the State Department came out with a detailed report on the forgery that the Times carried as a
news story and F1ora Lewis, her face plentifully covered
42
with egg, wrote an apology in her March 9 column. Similarly, journalist Claudia Wright published an article in November 1982 charging that UN Ambassador Jeane J.
KirkpatEiclt had received a "birthday gift" from the Union
of South Afriea. The basis was a letter from the information counselor at the South African embassy, a crude forgery replete with errors in spelling. 54 (Since Miss Wright is
herself a utopian journalist, the question as to whether she
was herself taken in must remain open.)
Media elite instantly distrust government assertions
that contradict utopian views with which they identify. A
storm broke over the Washington Post and the Wall Street
Journal when it became know that the journalists of both
had relied upon Philip Agee as a source for articles they
wrote attacking a February 1981 U.S. White Paper "Communist Interference in El Salvador." The White Paper
summarized findings from captured documents of the El
Salvador guerrillas, showing the extent of clandestine military support given by the Soviet Union and Cuba to the
guerrillas beginning in 1979. As a result of the furor, even
how the articles came to be written became public knowledge. The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Kwitny told his
editor of his immediate "skepticism over news accounts of
the white paper."55 The Washington Post's Robert Kaiser
said that he had immediately been eager to explore possible deficiencies in the White Paper and so was pleased
when the Post's national editor, Peter Osnos, asked him to
look into the matter. And Peter Osnos revealed that he
had assigned Kaiser after a call from free-lance writer Jeffrey Stein who said: "Look, I can't understand how you all
have let that White Paper hang out there without a look. 56
(Stein was a former fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, suggesting that the utopian grape vine operates
quickly to encourage attacks on anything the utopians
consider damaging to them.) For the utopians it was crucial to discredit the White Paper, since if the American
public recognized the Soviet-Cuban role in El Salvador,
the carefully fostered image of the guerrillas as indigenous
liberal reformers might be undermined.
Philip Agee, according to Arnaud de Borchgrave helped
by his "Cuban friends," provided a forty-six page attack on
the White Paper which was distributed in April by the
Covert Action Information Bulletin. This publication was
started after an internal factional split at CounterSpy, the
magazine that named U.S. agents abroad, with Agee becoming associated with the new magazine. Both the Post's
Kaiser and the Journal's Kwitny obtained copies. Kaiser
subsequently claimed that in an early draft of his article he
had mentioned Agee as a source, but that his editor at the
Post suggested dropping the reference as "unnecessary."57
Confronted with his failure to credit Agee's paper as a
source in this Wall Street Journal story Kwitny was taken
aback: "I was totally unaware that it had any distribution,
except to a few of his friends here." 58 He insisted that
while he had read Agee's paper: "There was nothing I was
drawing from him or anyone else ... I can't really rememWINTER/SPRING 1983
�ber what was in the Agee piece." In a line by line comparison, Human Events reporter Cliff Kincaid showed, however, that not only did Kwitny's criticisms closely parallel
those of Agee, but that Kwitny even repeated a specific
Agee error: he referred to "labor unions" (Agee said "trade
unions") when the document being analyzed was talking
about the Communist Party. 59
Perhaps the most interesting revelations showed the
wide use by journalists of the Agee apparatus and the igno·
rance of those in executive positions on major papers of
the web of utopian organizations. Frederick Taylor, executive editor of the Wall Street Journal, came to the defense of his reporter in a long article on the editorial page
entitled "TheEl Salvador 'White Paper."' The Wall Street
Journal had been accused "at the least of being the dupe of
Soviet disinformation, and at the worst of taking the work
of a discredited left-winger and passing it off as its own."
"It isn't so." As proof, Taylor repeated Kwitny's own
words:
The article originated in my own skepticism over news ac~
counts ofthe white paper in February. It sprouted because of
two events in April. First, having been asked to sort the files
of my recently deceased Journal colleague, Jerry Landauer, I
called someone who had been a longstanding source of Jerry's
on intelligence matters . ... This source, John Kelly, edits a
magazine, Counterspy, which also printed a critique of the
white paper. Kelly supplied me with some leads and documents. 50
To defend the Journal from charges of being a dupe of disinformation and of passing off the charges of a discredited
left-winger as its own by transferring responsibility from
Agee to CounterSpy and to inform the Wall Street Journal's
readers thatthey had all along been kept informed on intelligence matters by CounterSpy, was, to say the least, a remarkable editorial defense.
Apparently there was a similar gap between editors and
reporters at the Washington Post. When a Washington Post
editorial condemned CounterSpy's clone, the Covert
Action Information Bulletin, as "contemptible" and suggested its editors were less than honorable journalists, they
lashed back:
Your diatribe only highlights the gap betwen the editorial offices and the reporters, for your people are among the large
number of working journalists from virtually all the major
printed and electronic media in the country who call upon us
daily for help, research, and of all things, names of intelligence
operatives in connection with articles they are writing.6I
The difficulty journalists have in believing anything the
government says that interferes with their prejudices, no
matter how overwhelming the evidence, has become obvious to government officials. Admiral Bobby Inman, on retiring as deputy director of the CIA, spoke of his frustration
at trying to convince the public of the peril of the Soviet
military build-up when the press would not even believe
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
U.S. intelligence reports that included spy satellite pictures. Inman described an intelligence briefing for the press
on the Soviet and Cuban-backed military build-up in Nicaragua in which reporters were shown photos of Soviet-type
military garrison arrangements, deployed Soviet T-55
tanks, etc. Newspaper accounts the following day used the
word "alleged" to describe the intelligence findings, suggesting that the reporters did not believe them. 62 .
The media do more than believe the utopians. They protect them. News that could prove embarrassing to the utopians is often simply not reported. Reed Irvine has christened this "the Pinsky Principle" after North Carolina
journalist Walter Pinsky, who described his approach in the
Columbia Journalism Review in 1976. "If my research and
journalistic instincts tell me one thing, my political instincts
another ... I won't fudge it, I won't bend it, but I won't
write it "63 Pinsky gave as an example what he called the
great untold story ofthe trial of)oan Little in his home state.
Joan Little was an imprisoned black woman who had killed
her guard and defended herself on the grounds that he had
tried to assault her sexually. Her story was widely reported
nationally. Pinsky explained that he meant that reporters
never reported the role of the Communist Party, working
through its front, the National Alliance Against Racist and
Political Repression, in controlling the entire political
movement surrounding the case. Pinsky says that journalists kept silent "out of concern that the information might
be used in red-baiting anyone associated with the case who
did not belong to the (Communist) party."64
ABC newsman Geraldo Rivera in an interview with Playboy confessed to practicing the Pinsky Principle in his reporting from Panama. When the Panamanian National
Guard was guilty of violence at the time of the Senate vote
on the Canal Treaties, "We downplayed the whole incident That was the day I decided that I had to be very careful about what was said, because I could defeat the very
thing (passage of the Treaty) that I wanted to achieve."65
An interesting example of the Pinsky Principle was the
failure of CBS in its two-part docudrama, "Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones," to say a word concerning
Jones as a Communist Jones had broken with the U.S.
Communist Party, according to his own account, because it
had turned against Stalin and "I loved Stalin." Nonetheless,
his feelings toward the party had clearly mellowed, for his
will provided that in the absence of immediate surviving
family, his estate should go to the U.S. Communist Party.
Jones had also ordered that $7 million belonging to the People's Temple be transferred to the Soviet Union. When the
script's author Ernest Tidyman was asked about the omission he said he did not believe Jones was a Communist.
Asked what Jones's political views were, Tidyman replied:
"None, particularly. He was very liberal, very progressive,
very community conscious." 66 Presumably, for Tidyman,
giving the facts abcrutJones's Communism would interfere
with the image he wanted to convey of) ones as an idealistic
community-builder gone awry.
43
�More recently the Pinsky Principle has been at work in
the refusal of the media to examine the utopian roots of the
peace movement and its links to the international Soviet
front, the World Peace Council. With rare exceptions, nota·
blythe Wall Street Journal and the Reader's Digest, the mass
media have portrayed the freeze as a spontaneous out·
growth of grass roots Middle America. Even when the orga·
nizations that created and promoted the freeze are credited
as in a Newsweek article of April26, 1982, the identifications
are superficial, giving no hint of the agenda of these organi·
zations. For example, although Clergy and Laity Con·
cerned is described as "a powerful force in the disarmament
movement," it is identified only as a group "begun in 1965
to mobilize the religious community against the Vietnam
War." There is an element oflaziness in this: it is easier to
ask a group about itself over the phone than to acquire its
literature which would explain that CALC sees its task to be
joining together those who "hate the corporate power
which the United States presently represents .... "
But more importantly there is unwillingness to transmit
facts that might put the utopians in an unfavorable light.
Eileen Shanahan, assistant managing editor of the Pitts·
burgh Post-Gazette, observed: "I saw it at the Washington
Star and I'm seeing it here. The present 28-35 news room
set is antiwar to a significant degree and also antinuke."67
When President Regan or members of Congress made any
reference to the credentials of the groups behind the
freeze, the prestige media lashed out. A New York Times
editorial on October 6, 1982, labelled all reference to such
matters an "indecent debate." A Washington Post editorial
on the same date said that to bring up such topics was a
Smear."
Probably the most widespread application of the Pinsky
Principle is the failure to identify utopian sources. Identifi·
cation is a crucial service the media offer the viewer or
reader, for without it he has no way of evaluating the infor·
mation offered to him. For example, the New York Times
reported that a National Lawyers Guild delegation to the
Middle East "came away convinced that the Israeli govern·
ment implements a policy of torture for the annexation of
the occupied areas." Since the National Lawyers Guild, the
major organization of radical lawyers, was identified only as
"a group of American lawyers," the reader was not helped
to be properly sceptical of this information.68 Similarly, the
New York Times, which between 1979 and 1981 carried
essays by Fellows of the Institute for Policy Studies on its
Op-Ed page with more than twice the frequency of any
other think tank, including much bigger and better known
ones, identified the Institute in each case only as "an independent research organization in Washington, D.C." The
suggestion was that the reader was being exposed to "independent" thought, not the radical left perspective invariably provided by Institute Fellows.
A particularly dramatic example of misrepresentation
through failure of identification is the media's treatment of
Wilfred Burchett. Burchett is an Australian journalist. As
41
44
far back as 1967 The Reporter, a liberal magazine of the
period, published an article by fellow Australian Denis
Warner which summed up Burchett's history up to that
point:
Stripped of his Australian passport by Canberra in 1955 and
denied Australian citizenship for his three children by a sec·
ond marriage-one born in Hanoi, one in Peking, and one in
Moscow-Burchett is regarded by those responsible for Australian security as a communist and a traitor who ought to
stand trial for his role in the Korean war . ... 69
Burchett was accused by American POWs returning
from Korea of involvement in obtaining phony confessions
from them about America's alleged use of germ warfare.
Burchett showed up again during the Vietnam war. Senator Jeremiah Denton described being interviewed by Burchett while he was a prisoner in North Vietnam. In his book
When Hell Was in Session he says that Burchett lost his cool
"when I implied that he was a cheap traitor who knew in his
heart that he was prostituting his talents for money in a
cause that he knew was false." 70
In these years Burchett's articles occasionally appeared
in U.S. papers, but he was properly identified. For example,
the Chicago Tribune carried an essay on June 5, 1966, with
the following description of Burchett: "An Australian Communist writer, Wilfred Burchett has travelled frequently to
North Vietnam. He wrote this article after returning to his
Cambodian home from his latest trip. It gives a communist
view ofthe war and its effects and it should be read as such."
But starting in the late 1970s Burchett's essays began to
be printed without any identification that could alert the
reader. The New York Times published his essays on the
Op-Ed page, identifying him only as "a left-wing journalist
living in Paris." After Reed Irvine complained to Times
publisher Arthur Sulzberger that this was an inadequate
identification-and Sulzberger agreed-the Times Op-Ed
page, in the following year, identified him as "a journalist
living in Paris." Harper's published a review by Burchett of a
book attacking the CIA, identifying him only as "a left-wing
journalist" and "a personal friend of Ho Chi Minh." The
same Chicago Tribune that had fully identified Burchett in
1966 introduced him to its readers quite differently on August 6, 1982: "A man whose business is informing the world
is an Australian expatriate journalist, Wilfred Burchett,
now living in Paris."
Burchett's autobiography was published in 1981 by the
New York Times Book Company with an introduction by
long-time Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury, who
concluded that Burchett was radical "because he believes
in the underdog whatever the continent, whatever the
color, whatever the creed." 71 Laudatory reviews in the prestige press evaded or glossed over the subject of Burchett's
service to Communist regimes. The New York Times reviewer wrote: "His (Burchett's) uncommon honesty-he is
honest most of the time, if not quite all of the time-give his
WINTER/ SPRING 1983
�memoirs a degree of intellectual tensioi). •>72 (The reviewer
is not clear as to why he thinks being honest "most of the
time" is uncommon honesty. Is "common honesty" to be
dishonest most of the time?) According to the Washington
Post's reviewer, Burchett's story is that of a man "who early
in his life identified what he saw as the forces of decency
and justice and determined to march with them ... if ...
he has on occasion been forced into self-censorship and
compromises, they have been compromises of a nature
known, whatever they may say, to journalists of all political
colors." 73 The most remarkable review of all was by former
New York Times obituary editor Alden Whitman in the Boston Globe. Whitman described Burchett as one of those
rare journalists "who are distinguished for their primary
allegiance to their readers and to the cause of human betterment . ... He seems to wear no one's collar but his own." As
for Burchett's Communism: "Because Burchett so often
reported uncomfortable truths and because so much of his
work was done in China, North Vietnam, and Kampuchea,
word was put out that he was a communist."74
What is involved here is more than "failure to identify."
Implicit is a rewriting of political history. This is a major
utopian target which the media abet. Communists are
transformed into "liberals." For example, Joseph Barnes,
foreign editor of the former New York Herald Tribune, who
was exposed as a Communist by a series of his former colleagues who broke with the party, started to be referred to
in the press as a "liberal" in the late 1970s. The Rosenberg
case has been transmogrified. In 1978, on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the execution of the Rosen bergs for treason,
Public Television served up a four-year-old documentary
with a new introduction and epilogue, "The RosenbergSobell Case Revisited." Atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were portrayed as individuals singled out for their political beliefs by a malignant government. When Accuracy
in Media wrote to the President of the Public Broadcasting
System to complain about the film's gross distortion of history, the reply came from the program's producer. Ignoring
the long list of factual criticisms AIM had submitted, he
announced loftily that the suggestion the program embodied Communist propaganda reflected discredit on
AJM75.
In 1982 Telefrance USA, which says that its programs
reach 10 million U.S. homes, broadcast a four-part Frenchmade documentary on the Rosenberg case with the emotional title, "The Rosenbergs Must Not Die." They were
portrayed as innocents railroaded by a corrupt government.
Dorothy Rabinowitz in a Wall Street Journal essay noted
that "no more malevolent band of fascists, scoundrels, cynics and thugs" had ever appeared on a screen than the "assortment of characters supposedly representing an American Supreme Court, an American judge and prosecutor
and members of the FBJ."76 The New York Times reviewer
at least dismissed the program. Cablevision Magazine, however, allowed that there was the "recurring paradox of how
a foreigner-an outsider-may have a fuller perspective on
TifE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a situation, political or otherwise, than someone more directly involved."77
Misidentification and the rewriting of political history
produce reporting that inhibits, rather than helps, public
understanding of political developments. For example,
press coverage of Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground leader captured during the Brink's robbery in
Nyack, depicted her-to quote from a typical account in
the Boston Globe-as a "child of privilege," "a brainy, popular tomboy who graduated with honors from the 'right'
schools, the type of girl that people once described as allAmerican." But Kathy Boudin was a red-diaper baby, the
child of radical lawyer, Leonard Boudin. The circle of her
father's friends was largely made up of Communists and
those sympathetic to Communism. (The Globe story itself
bore this out by listing some of the individuals she would
have encountered at her parents' dining table, but did not
identify them either). Kathy Boudin's political development would have become considerably less mysterious if
the media had not concealed relevant information.
Journalistic practices like the Pinsky Principle have
grown common as journalists have changed their view of
their proper role. "Advocacy," "participatory," and "activist" journalism have created new models. To some extent
the ((new journalism," as it is sometimes called, has developed because its literary techniques produce more dramatic copy at a time of intense competition from television, with its strong visual imagery. A "composite"
prostitute (and why confuse the reader by identifying her
as such) can offer a more interesting biography than any
single individual. Similarly, a report that suggests the
writer is directly privy to the thoughts and beliefs of his
subject has more impact than an article with tiresome inserts like "A neighbor said that" or "The defendant's lawyer claims that. ... "
The new journalism is also a reflection of the changing
aspirations of journalists. Journalists are now in a position
to set the policies of papers. They were not in an earlier
era, when conservative owners set their stamp upon their
property. With many more years of education than they
used to have, with higher status in society, journalists are
dissatisfied with a role that limits them simply to chronicling what happens. As lawyer Max Kampelman noted in a
1978 essay in Policy Review:
It is understandable that a significant segment of the media
has become impatient with its limited information dissemination role. It is not easy and frequently not exciting for an intelligent person simply to report events. The tendency, therefore, has been for imaginative and socially dedicated journalists to go beyond normal reporting in order to seek fuller expression of their talents or social values. 78
Joseph Kraft notes: "Not only have we traded objectivity for bias, but we have also abandoned a place on the
sidelines for a piece of the action."79 Jim Bormann, a pio-
45
�neer in broadcast news, described. listening to journalist
Alex Kendrick telling a CBS news affiliate session that a
good reporter should not be afraid, while covering a riot, to
throw a few bricks himself. Kendrick urged the contemporary newsman to get involved and then report what he felt
"inside."8 Kraft and Borman are critical of what hapP<;ned. Most influential journalists, however, are pleased
w1th the new role they have assumed. David Broder of the
Washington Post has praised television's Bill Moyers as a
politician "of the most serious sort'' who "is consciously
engaged in the struggle to reshape the future of public policy."81 John Oakes of the New York Times reports the comment of an approving Swiss journalist who told him the
mass media in the United States were "the only real opposition in the country."82
"Facts" are seen in a fresh light by the new journalism.
As writer Naomi Munson pointed out in Commentary,
while reporters had seen their job as sniffing out facts
" more and more these days they have come to regard'
themselves, instead, in a grander light, as bloodhounds of
the 'truth."' 83 The problem with this is that facts then become at best a tool for revealing the truth. At worst facts
become an impediment to the "truth" which must be
sloughed off, ignored, buried, so as not to interfere with
the public's ability to perceive what in a "higher sense" is
true. Gay Talese, a writer who was godfather to the new
journalism, said its techniques allowed the presentation of
"a larger truth than is possible through rigid adherence" to
normal newspaper standards.84
One result of the new journalism was to create a scandal
like the one that erupted over Janet Cooke and the nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict "Jimmy." After the
Washington Post was forced to return the Pulitzer Prize
which the story had won, it tried to pass off what had happened as the victimization of a newspaper by one of its
reporters. According to the Post's published account, no
editor anywhere was safe from the machinations of a determined liar.
It was not so simple. Newspapers, the Post among them,
had developed a pattern of shutting their eyes to the fictional aspects of the new journalism. When the Daily
News accepted the resignation of its prize-winning journalist Michael Daley a month after the Cooke scandal-he
was accused of manufacturing material for an article on
British Army brutality in Northern Ireland-Daley remarked that he had used pseudonyms and reconstructions
on many of his 300 columns and "no one has ever said anything."85 In the case of Janet Cooke, Vivian AplinBrownlee, Cooke's editor on the District Weekly, to which
she had been assigned in her first year at the Post, claimed
that she did not believe the story from the beginning and
said so to the city editor."
°
I knew her so well and the depth of her. In her eagerness to
make a name she would write farther than the truth would
allow. When challenged on facts in other stories, Janet would
46
reverse herself, but without any dismay or consternation with
herself86
What this meant was that Janet Cooke was repeatedly
caught in misstatements of fact while she worked for the
Post, but the editors, instead of firing her, had promoted
her.
Despite what the Post's ombudsman Bill Green later admitted were "rumblings" in the newsroom, the Post made
no attempt to check the story or even to ask to see Jane
Cooke's tapes or notes. A few days after the story was published, Post reporter Courtland Milloy drove Janet Cooke
through the neighborhood where she claimed Jimmy lived
and he could see she did not know the area. He reported
his doubts to the city editor, but the editor, as he later confessed, thought Milloy was motivated by jealousy.87 The
mayor and police officials asked the Post to disclose the
identity of the child so he could be helped. Presumably the
life of an eight-year-old boy hung in the balance, but the
Post merely launched into high-flown rhetoric on confidentiality, leaving the police to launch an intensive, expensive, and naturally vain search.
The Post's ombudsman, Green, whose task it is to monitor the paper's performance, wrote a column replete with
utopian cliches, without himself bothering to make any investigation into the story:
Jimmy probably doesn't know many of the promises that have
been made to him. There was the Great Society and the war on
poverty. There are police who promise to uphold the law.
There are schools that promise that everybody will be given a
fair start, a chance to make it. There are the agencies that
promise if you get into trouble, you can get help. Beyond this,
there is the country's glittering promise that things will be bet.
ter if you work. 88
Green promised ringingly that Jimmy could be assured that
at least the Post's promise to him of anonymity would be
kept.
Since the police search was finally abandoned, Janet
Cooke would have been safe had she not lied about her
academic credentials. The Post released biographical data
on their prizewinning reporter. Cooke's claim to a Vassar
B.A. she did not have led to the unravelling of the whole
fabric of invention.
The media's reaction to charges of bias is one of genuine
outrage. Irving Kristol has pointed out that "the television
networks and national newspapers are sincerely convinced
that a liberal bias is proof of journalistic integrity."89 CBS
News President Richard Salant retorted indignantly to suggestions of bias: :"Our reporters do not cover stories from
their point of view. They are representing them from nobody's point of view."90 An interviewer asked Washington
Post editor Benjamin Bradlee:
Are you suggesting that it is untrue ... that you have a cadre of
highly motivated, intelligent, skillful, young liberal reporters
WINTER/SPRING
1983
�who tend to slant their stories toward D~mocrats, liberals, as
they write for the news pages?"
He replied: I am very definitely denying that."9l
At the very time Bradlee was saying this, in the spring of
1972, a ucounter~convention" of American journalists,
sponsored by the journalism review More, was being attended by over 2,000 journalists, including such media
"stars" as Dan Rather, Tom Wicker, David Halberstam,
and Murray Kempton. In an article describing the purpose
of the meeting, More explained: "A growing number of
people who put out the nation's newspapers and magazines and splice together the nightly news are no longer
going to accept the old ways of doing things." The "new"
journalists, said More, were ((sensitive" people who turned
"their attention to the kind of journalism that might help
improve the quality of life rather than objectively recording its decline.''92
How do journalists manage to believe they maintain the
professional journalistic creed of objectivity at the same
time that they transmit, as we have seen, the utopian
world view? Many journalists seem to mistake a sense of
superiority for objectivity. In the fifth and final segment of
CBS's series on defense, President Reagan and Chairman
Brezhnev were shown making speeches denouncing each
other. Cronkite then appeared, like the patient parent of
quarreling children, to lament that from both the Kremlin
and the White House came "angry words." Presenting the
United States and the Soviet Union as mirror-image societies seems to constitute self-evident proof of objectivity
to Cronkite and the media elite. Journalists from the prestige media in England revealed a similar concept of objectivity as "a plague on both your houses" during the
Falkland war. They used the term "the British" rather
than "we," outraging much of the public.
Convinced of their own objectivity, the media are arrogant and dismissive when criticized. Reed Irvine notes
that when he and a group of friends who belonged to the
McDowell luncheon group decided in 1969 to start Accu·
racy in Media, they were convinced that if they did research on cases of media inaccuracy, those responsible
would have no choice but to admit they were wrong, issue
corrections, and be more careful in the future. Irvine
laughs ruefully as he recalls: "We soon found out it really
did not work that way."93
The arrogance is sometimes breathtaking, as the media
unhesitatingly ignore in their own case the demands they
make of others. For example, CBS has been the most aggressive of the networks in claiming for television cameras
the right to cover imy event open to the print media. Yet
when CBS held its annual meeting in Aprill980, the press
was admitted, but television cameras were barred. William
Paley, long-time chairman of CBS, declared they would be
disruptive to the audience. Reed Irvine asked whether he
would recommend that Congress adopt the same policy.
The following colloquy ensued:
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Paley: I would not.
Irvine: Just CBS.
Paley: We have adopted the policy, for the time being
anyway, which has been clearly enunciated today.
That's all I can say about it.94
One journalist remarked that it was like distillers holding a
meeting and barring booze.
After CBS aired a documentary in January 1982 that
charged General William Westmoreland with leading a
conspiracy to deceive President Johnson as to the strength
of enemy forces in Vietnam, revelations in a TV Guide article "Anatomy of a Smear" of what the authors called "inaccuracies, distortions, and violations of journalistic stan-
dards" by CBS led the network to commission its own
study. But CBS then kept the report secret, presumably
because it was damaging to the network. It is not hard to
imagine the reaction of CBS if a branch of government had
kept a report secret in comparable circumstances. (Eventually CBS was forced by the courts to release the report.)
The reaction to criticism is sometimes vituperative. Responding to an issue of AIM Report that clearly touched a
nerve, the Post's editor Benjamin Bradlee wrote to Irvine:
"You have revealed yourself as a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante, and I for one am sick of wasting my
time in communicating with you." 95 After looking up "retromingent/' which means "urinating backward," Irvine
framed the letter and hung it in the office.
All the sins of advocacy journalism, the fictions supporting a "higher truth," the selective coverage, the attacks on
what are perceived as "the bad buys" and whitewashing of
the "good guys" came together in a media crusade against
Israel during its war against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982.
In a major study for Policy Review, Joshua Muravchik has
provided the fullest account of media distortion on a single
topic since Peter Braestrup's two-volume analysis of the
media's coverage of the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Muravchik found variations in culpability: the Washington Post
was much worse than the New York Times; NBC was
worse than ABC which was worse than CBS; Time and
Newsweek, on the other hand, turned in equally abysmal
performances. But all the media were involved in tendentious and inaccurate reporting with one target-to make
Israel look bad.96
Muravchik piles high the examples of media misstatement of fact. For example, wildly exaggerated casualty reports, falsely attributed to the internationally respected
Red Cross (in fact they came from the nonrelated Red
Crescent, an arm of the PLO run by Arafat's brother), continued to be cited repeatedly after the Red Cross had formally repudiated them. These were soon accompanied by
equally inflated portraits of destruction from supposed
eye-witness journalists in Beirut. While all the media were
guilty of this, the prize may well have belonged to ABC
which, in June, before the Israelis had launched any serious bombing of the city, described Beirut as a result of Israeli shelling, as resembling a some ancient ruin."
47
�Symptomatic of the pervasive dishonesty was a photo
distributed by United Press International with a caption
which said it showed a seven-month-old baby who had lost
both arms in an Israeli raid. Secretary of State George
Shultz, in a statement meant to be critical of Israel, said
"the symbol of this war is a baby with its arms shot off." It
was a symbol not of the war, but of the media's coverage of
it. Subsequent investigation showed that the baby had not
been badly hurt -both its arms were intact. And while civilians, including children, were obviously hit by Israeli
bombs, it so happened that in this case the time, place, and
direction of bombing made it clear that the baby had been
hit by PLO shelling, which the media rarely mentioned,
but which was also a feature of the war.
Verbal attacks on Israel were the staple fare of journalists. CBS' Bill Moyers accused her of waging "total war;"
NBC's John Chancellor talked of an "imperial Israel" and
oflsrael as "a warrior state;" ABC's Threlkeld said she was
"the neighborhood bully." Time and Newsweek referred to
Israel's leaders as "stubborn," "outrageous," and utrouble~
some." Even Israel's release of captured PLO documents,
revealing the extent of Soviet involvement in training of
the international terrorist network, surely of interest to the
West, was dismissed as part of Israel's ((propaganda war.n
Muravchik notes that ABC's Steve Mallory developed a
regular routine of arriving at an area after it was hit by Israeli bombs or shells and announcing, usually wrongly,
that there was no military target there.
The stories the media failed to tell were equally important. Except for the Times, the media had almost nothing
to say of the welcome the Israelis received in Southern
Lebanon by Christians and Moslems delighted to be rid of
thePLO.
But perhaps the media bias was best revealed by the television networks' attacks on Israel for censorship. (The
PLO's censorship, exercised by guns directed against unwelcome TV cameras, was never mentioned.) When ABC
broke Israel's censorship by broadcasting an interview
with Arafat that had been disallowed by the censor, Israel
punished the network by temporarily refusing it access to
Israeli television facilities. ABC accused Israel on the air of
"an intolerable act of political censorship." Israel explained that while it exercised only military censorship on
reports from Israel's side of the battle line, its extension of
its facilities for reports from the enemy's side was a favor
to journalists that it would not allow to be used for the
PLO's political advantage. ABC had agreed to the rules
and then broken them. As Israel saw it, it was as if Britain
had been held responsible for "intolerable censorship" for
failing to channel propaganda speeches by Goebbels from
Germany during World War II if German transmission facilities were not working. But as Muravchik notes, while
Israel's position was one with which the public might or
might not have sympathized, they never heard Israel's side
of the story because the networks would not report it.
They were thus as guilty of "censorship" of information
48
possibly detrimental to them as Israel was. The other networks repeatedly showed black screens on which were
superimposed statements like "22 Seconds Deleted by
Israeli Censors" or "Pictures Censored." NBC set a rec~
ord of sorts when in a single news story on June 5 the
network managed to refer four separate times to Israeli
censorship.
Yet IsraeYs censorship-in wartime-was far less restrictive than that of most other countries at any time and compared very favorably with the censorship of other Middle
Eastern countries. Moreover, while dispatches from other
Middle Eastern countries were censored, the networks
only flashed on the screen references to Israeli censorship.
Eventually NBC began to flash on the screen "Cleared by
Syrian censors," and CBS several weeks later followed
suit. But by the end of August ABC, although it often
broadcast from Syria, still made no reference to Syrian
censorship while routinely using "Cleared by Israeli censors." (Ironically if Israel had kept out all foreign journalists, she would presumably have fared much better at their
hands. This is what the British did during their war with
Argentina over the Falklands that was going on simultaneously, and the media kept silent about "censorship.")
Why should Israel specifically have become a target of
the accumulated vices of advocacy journalism? Robert
Elegant, in the 1981 Encounter essay on media performance in Vietnam that Morley Safer found so offensive,
went to the heart of the problem. Elegant in effect prophesied the media's behavior in arguing that the adversary
stance of the press during Vietnam was prototypical of
what the reaction of the Western press was likely to be to
any war: the press, he wrote, serves as multiplier of the
prejudices of the western intelligentsia whose tender conscience moves it to condemn actions by its own side while
condoning those of its enemies.97 Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz noted an additional factor: Israel refuted
all the lessons of Vietnam, showing that military force
could be necessary, even beneficial, and that a Soviet client could be defeated by an American ally. Podhoretz saw
the attacks on Israel as a cover for the loss of American
nerve, acquiescence in terrorism, and appeasement of to-
talitarianism.98 In Muravchik's view the most important
single factor in the anti-Israel bias was that the war violated the precept that "violence never solves anything."
This was the media's adaptation of the utopian perspective which could more accurately be summed up as "Violence from the left is the only violence that solves anything." Muravchik notes that it is ironic that the belief that
violence solves nothing should have become ascendant in
the media under the impact of the war in Vietnam, for at
the end of that war "violence solved everything-to the
satisfaction of the communists."
Given the extraordinary depths to which the media sank
in the reporting on Lebanon, the analysis of the Columbia
Journalism Review on media reporting of the war is interesting. It concluded that American journalism
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�reported what it saw for the most par~ fairly and accurately
and sometimes brilliantly, provided balanced comment, and
provoked and absorbed controversy. For performance under
fire, readers and viewers could have ask~d for little more. 99
Except for the remark that the coverage "provoked and
absorbed controversy," which was certainly true, this
could scarcely have been further from the mark. But it
does underscore the extent to which the major journalism
reviews, of which Columbia's is probably the most influen·
tial, have themselves become exponents of advocacy journalism. If the press is going to change its ways, it will not
be because of monitoring by the major journalism reviews.
Media needs and attitudes and utopian goals dovetail
nicely. From the point of view of the utopians, stories that
the media may like because of their inherent drama break
down faith in authority. When ABC launched "20/20" to
compete with CBS's highly successful "60 Minutes," the
program was known around the studio as the "cancer scare
of the week." While ABC may have pursued ratings, for
the utopians the programs reveal the wickedness or incapacity of government and corporations, which deny thereality of the dangers or fail to meet them. The media rarely
report human rights violations in totalitarian societies because they cannot gain access to them. For the utopians
these are stories that should be ignored, for they might interfere with their effort to mobilize public opinion against
non-Communist countries threatened by those whose aim
is to establish regimes of the sort that already exist in Cuba
and North Vietnam.
While in theory the fondness for scare stories could
make reports on the Soviet military build-up and Soviet
intelligence agencies appealing, here pervasive liberal orthodoxy among journalists comes into play. It leads them
to downgrade the notion that there is such a thing as a
genuine Soviet threat. It also leads them to automatic sympathy with proposals that come from disarmament groups,
which they become extremely reluctant to report on fully
for fear the effect would be to "unmask" them. This prevents the public from developing scepticism about the
programs of these groups. The media's portrait enforces
the utopian view of the world and makes the calls of the
utopians for "de·industrialization," "decentralization of
industry," solar roof collectors instead of central power stations, seem safer to try than they otherwise would. The
utopian agenda becomes more plausible and attractive as
our familiar world is seen to be threatened only by the callousness and rapacity of our own institutions.
1. Quoted in TV and National Defense: An Analysis of CBS News 19721973, Ernest W. Lefever ed., Institute for American Strategy Press, Boston, Va.l974, 14.
2. Melvin G. Grayson and Thomas R Shepard, The Disaster Lobby, Chicago: Follett Publishing Co., 1973, 266.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
3. S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman "Media and Business Elites,"
Public Opinion, Oct./Nov. 1981, 42-44.
4. Lichter and Rothman, Public Opinion, Oct./Nov. 1981, 59-60.
5. Robert J. Lowenberg, "Journalism and 'Free Speech' as' Political
Power," Scholastic, Dec. 1982, 12.
6. Quoted by Joseph Kraft, "The Imperial Media," Commentary, May
1981.
7. AIM Report, (I) September l, 1979.
8. AIM Report, (I) june 1977.
9. AIM Report, (I) Oct. 1979.
10. Sophia Peterson, "Foreign News Gatekeepers and Criteria of Newsworthiness," Journalism Quarterly, Spring 1979, 116.
11. Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "The Nuclear Energy Debate: Scientists, the Media and the Public," Public Opinion, Aug./Sept.
1982, 51.
12. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 52.
13. Robert DuPont, Nuclear Phobia, The Media Institute.
14. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982,47.
15. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept.1982, 49.
16. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 51
17. Samuel McCracken, The War Against the Atom, New York: Basic
Books, 1982, 108.
18. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 52.
19. Samuel McCracken, War, New York 1982, 108.
20. AIM Report, (II) March 1979.
21. Interview with Walter Cronkite, Utica (N.Y.) Press, November 13,
1974. quoted in TV and National Defense, Boston, Va., 1974 Frontispiece.
22. TV and National Defense, Boston, Va. 1974, 37.
23. Joshua Muravchik and John E. Haynes, "CBS vs. Defense," Commentary September 1981,46.
24. Muravchik and Haynes, Commentary, September 1981, 45.
25. Muravchik and Haynes, Commentary, September 1981, 48-49.
26. AIM Report, (I) Aprill979.
27. AIM Report, (II) May 1978.
28. AIM Report, (I) February 1979.
29. AIM Report, (I) February 1979.
30. AIM Report, (II) March 1978.
31. AIM Report, (II) Oct. 1979.
32. AIM Report, (I) july 1977.
33. AIM Report, (I) Feb. 1979.
34. AIM Report, (II) Oct. 1979.
35. Contentions, newsletter of the Committee for the Free World, December 1981.
36. AIM Report, (II) May 1980.
37. AIM Report, (I) june 1982.
38. AIM Report, (II) june 1980.
39. AIM Report, (II) june 1980.
40. AIM Report, (I) March 1979.
41. Human Events, Apri124,1982: New York Times April9, 1982.
42. Contentions, Committee for the Free World, April-May 1982.
43. AIM Report, (I) Sept. 1977.
44. Guild Notes, publication of the National Lawyers Guild, April, 1980.
45. Guild Notes, April, 1980.
46. Business Week, October 18, 1982.
47. Crooks, Conmen and Clowns, Media Institute, Washington D.C.
1981, ix-x.
48. Ben Stein, The View from Sunset Boulevard, New York: Basic Books
1979, 20.
49. Sunset, New York 1979, 33.
50. AIM Report, (II) Sept. 1980.
51. Interview with Peter Metzger, January 29, 1982.
52. AIM Report, May, 1978.
53. AIM Report, (II) july 1982.
54. New York Times, November 12, 1982.
55. Wall Street Journal, August 21, 1981.
56. Human Events, july 11, 1981.
57. Human Ev.ents, July 11, 1981.
49
�58. Human Events, July II, 1981.
59. Human Events, July II, 1981.
60. Wall Street Journal, August 21, 1981.
61. Human Events, Sept. 26, 1981.
62. Daily News, May 12, 1982.
63. AIM Report, (I) Aprill978.
64. AIM Report, (I) April1978.
65. AIM Report, (I) July 1979.
66. AIM Report, (I) May 1980.
67. Bob Schulman, The Bulletin, American Society of Newspaper Editors, October 1982.
68. New York Times, August 2, 1977.
69. Quoted in Review of the News, September 8, 1982, 37.
70. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., When Hell Was in Session, So. Carolina:
Robert E. Hopper & Assoc., 1982, Chapter 11.
71. Wilfred Burchett, At the Barricades, New York: Times Books, 1981,
viii.
72. Quoted in AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
73. AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
74. AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
75. AIM Report, (I) September 1978.
76. Wall Street Journal, November 16, 1982.
77. Cablevision Magazine, October 25, 1982.
78. Max Kampehnan, "The Power of the Press," Policy Review, Fall,
1978, 18.
79. Joseph Kraft, "The Imperial Media," Commentary, May,l981.
80. Jim Bormann, "Honesty, Fairness and Real Objectivity-Keys to
Journalistic Credibility," Keynote address to Radio and Film News Directors Association, September 29, 1971.
81. AIM Report, (II) June 1982; Human Events September 4, 1982.
82. AIM Report, (II) May 1982.
83. Naomi Munson, "The Case of Janet Cooke," Commentary, August
1981,49.
84. New York Times, May 25, 1981.
85. New York Times, May 25, 1981.
86. AIM Report, (I) May 1981.
87. AIM Report, (I) May 1981.
88. AIM Report, (I) May 198 I.
89. Wall Street Journal, October 14, 1982.
90. TV and National Defense, Boston, Va., 11.
91. Grayson and Shepard, Lobby, Chicago 1973, 255.
92. Lobby, Chicago, 255-56
93. Interview with Reed Irvine, October 24, 1982.
94. AIM Report, (I) May 1980.
95. AIM Report, (II) June 1978.
96, Joshua Muravchik, "Misreporting Lebanon," Policy Review, Winter
1983.
97. Robert Elegant, "How to Lose a War," Encounter August 1981, p. 88.
98. Norman Podhoretz, 'TAccuse," Commentary, September 1982, pp.
30-31.
99. Roger Morris, "Beirut-and the Press-Under Siege," Columbia
Journalism Review Nov./Dec. 1982, 33.
ARRIVAL
The orchid waited eons for the ape.
With seasonal reserve, the old magnolia
Seduced the dragonfly. Unpressed,
The olive and the grape
Lingered in indigo or green,
Too pointedly perceived when not
By simian lens. The field, busy with discharge,
Was barren of delight.
Let ape appear: then fruit and fern, weary
Of insect assiduity, will wink
For recognition, oil and wine
Seek flask and cruet. As we,
No longer naked, know, not to be seen
Too close shows sensibility.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
50
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Benjamin Constant on Ancient
and Modern Liberty
Stephen Holmes
Progressives ritually deplore not only the low level of
popular participation in politics, but also its characteristic
lack of intensity. Conservatives reply that the feverish involvement of ordinarily apathetic citizens can destabilize
and even topple a democratic regime. Benjamin Constant
attempted to combine these two one-sided ideas, ideas that
are conventionally kept at an aseptic distance from one another. In modern societies, he asserted, political tyranny
may be closely associated with attempts to reglorify the
public realm. But tyranny can also be encouraged and sustained by excessive privatization. Too much and too little
civic spirit are equally dangerous. This double claim forms
the theoretical core of Constant's l819lecture on "Ancient
and Modern Liberty." 1
Precursors
The "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns"
which flourished in France toward the end of the seventeenth century was not merely a dispute about poetry. It
reflected a cultural cleavage between religious conservatives who viewed history as a process of degeneration and
advanced thinkers who exalted the refinements of modern
politesse over the crudities of the barbaric polis. 2 Defenders of "the moderns" hoped that a liberation of literature
from unsurpassable classical models would accompany the
gradual emancipation of science from the authority of ArisStephen Holmes teaches political philosophy at Harvard University.
The above essay comes from a book, Boundaries of the Political: the Sceptical Liberalism of Benjamin Constant, that Yale University Press will
publish in 1984.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
totelianism. Constant's vindication of liberal democracy
against the would-be imitators of classical democracy was
certainly influenced by these literary and scientific contests. Constant1 however, drew more heavily on a narrower
tradition of political theory.l
The proximate and primary source for Constant's dichotomy between two kinds of liberty was Montesquieu.
Among its other achievements, De !'esprit des lois drew universal attention to the astonishing differences between
modern England and ancient Sparta. 4 Although he never
used the phrase "modern liberty," Montesquieu had a
clear enough conception of it. In modern societies such as
England, he argued, the essence ofliberty was security. 5 In
Europe, security was notably threatened when nobles were
excessively independent and engaged in anarchic self-help
(as in Poland) and also when monarchs (as in Richelieu's
France) gathered too much power into their own hands. 6 In
either case men feared one another and the calculability of
life was drastically reduced. "In order for men to have this
[modern] liberty, the government must be such that a citizen cannot fear another citizen. 11 7
Constitutionalism, including the separation of powers,
was meant to arrest the seesaw of anarchy and despotism,
to introduce a salutary predictability into civic life. Protection from both baronial reprisals and lettres de cachet was
the essence of English liberty. Men knew that if they did
not break the law neither the police nor marauding private
armies would harass them. Security made it possible to
plan one's life and to enter into long-term cooperative ventures with one's neighbors. A state based on this modern
conception ofliberty enables its citizens to engage in a promiscuous variety of actions and lives. All citizens may contribute to a common pattern, but only as "dissonances in
music agree in the concord of the whole." 8
51
�The compatibility of the moderl)c constitutional state
with unregimented human diversity is one key to Montesquieu's contrast between modern England and ancient
Sparta. He called Sparta free (that is, free from foreign
domination), but he quickly added that "the only advantage of its liberty was glory."9 It was a small "society of
athletes and combatants," 10 where money was proscribed,11 where men were made cruel by harsh disciplinel2 and always ready to immolate their private lives for
the sake of their patrie. Sparta represented the apogee of
politics based on virtue.ll Motivated exclusively by virtue,
Spartans subordinated themselves unflinchingly to a single
overriding purpose: to live and die for the glory of their
state.l 4 They participated in public life, but only in the
sense that they played their parts; they certainly did not
influence" the course of deliberation in personal, idiosyncratic ways. In this 'warrior's guild," 15 in fact, collective
deliberation was less important than gymnastics.
Montesquieu could compare Sparta to a monastery that,
paradoxically enough, secured the undivided loyalty of its
inmates by starving them of all human possibilities except
those associated with the official functions of the group. 16
A modern state could never expect such extraordinary devotion from its citizens precisely because it is too munificent: it lavishes so many extrapolitical possibilities on the
individual that he feels "he can be happy without his patrie." 17 Intense politics based on virtue is thus out of place
in the modern state. Personal honor or avarice may motivate modern citizens; but self-abnegating patriotism cannot. That the English revolutionary attempt to resurrect a
polity based on virtue in the seventeenth century would
collapse in ridiculous hypocrisy was perfectly predictable. IS
Montesquieu's striking counterposition of England and
Sparta had a decisive impact on numerous writers besides
Rousseau.l9 Jean-louis de Lolme was typical. Writing in
the 1780s, he reformulated Montesquieu's contrast as a
distinction between private independence and political
influence:
44
4
To concur by one's suffrage in enacting laws is to enjoy a
share, whatever it may be, of power; to live in a state where the
laws are equal for all and sure to be executed (whatever may be
the means by which these advantages are attained), is to be
free. 20
Passages registering an analogous distinction between
sharing in legislative power and protection from the arbitrary acts of political officials can be found in the eighteenth-century works of Joseph Priestly, Adam Ferguson,
Jean-Charles Sismondi, and others.21 All these writers had a
clear awareness of what Constant would later describe as
the difference between ancient and modern liberty. Nevertheless, the claims to originality advanced at the beginning
of "De Ia liberte des anciens comparee d celle des modernes"
were not entirely unjustified. 22 The abstract dichotomy between ancient and modern liberty was not unprecedented,
but Constant used it in ways that were new.
52
Two Concepts of Liberty
Ancient liberty, Constant wrote, was "active and continuous participation in the exercise of collective power." 23
Modern liberty, by contrast, is "the peaceful enjoyment of
individual or private independence." 24 A hedonistic slide
from "exercise" to "enjoy" signaled the humanly debilitating consequences of modernization. Indeed, Constant's
distinction between ancient and modern liberty cannot be
studied apart from the notion, also inherited from Montesquieu, that European history is a curious blend of progress
and decay. He made remarkable assumptions about the human consequences of modernization:
The liberty of ancient times was whatever assured citizens the
largest share in exercising social power. The liberty of modern
times is whatever guarantees the independence of citizens
from their government. As a result of their character,_the ancients had an overriding need for action; and the need for
action is easily reconciled with a vast increase in social authority. The moderns need peace and enjoyment. Peace can be
found only in a limited number of laws that prevent citizens
from being harassed. Enjoyments are secured by a wide margin of individual liberty_ Any legislation requiring the sacrifice
of these enjoyments is incompatible with the present condition of mankind. 25
Because of the common but erroneous belief that negation
implies deprivation, "negative freedom" 26 is a misleading
translation of Ia liberte chez les modernes. Modern liberty,
as Constant conceived it, is as much a capacity for positive
action as ancient liberty had been.27 The difference only
lies in the character of the action and the field in which it
unfolds. Moreover, Constant distinguished between two
types of freedom in order to investigate the various relations between them, the ways in which they are not only
combinable but even mutually enhancing.
Not merely conceptual, Constant's distinction was initially historical. Each type of liberty, he urged, was originally bound to the institutions and life of a specific society.
Ancient liberty, in its unalloyed form, was only possible in a
sparsely populated, territorially compact, religiously homogeneous and slave-holding warrior's republic. 28 Modern
liberty is the innovation of large-scale, caste-free, internationally open, religiously pluralistic, and intensively commercial societies.29
Although intrigued by the contrast between public participation and private security, Constant did not allow it to
obscure the radically progressive content of modern liberty. In antiquity, "freedom" was a privileged status from
which men could be excluded by the chance of birth. Essential to modern liberalism, by contrast, is the demand
that freedom be distributed to all individuals regardless of
family origin. The relative importance which Constant ascribed to public and private spheres within modern liberty
was a direct function of the modern demand of citizenship
for all.
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�Constant's emphasis on a linkage between political
ideals and social contexts was not merely a subsidiary feature of his theory. In explicit contrast to the natural law and
contractarian traditions, he did not attempt to justify his
commitment to the liberal state by adducing ahistorical
traits of human nature. Once again following Montesquieu
and other eighteenth-century (particularly Scottish) examples, he deliberately supplanted the contract myth with a
theory of social change. 30 The liberal state is desirable not
because it mirrors human nature or respects eternal human
rights, but because it is the political arrangement most
adequate to solving the problems of European society
in its current state of economic, scientific, and moral
development.
Constant's conception of social change was also vital to
another striking thesis of the 1819 lecture, an idea elaborated at greater length in De !'esprit de conquete et de !'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec Ia civilisation europeenne of
1814: the modern appeal to classical republican ideals is an
anachronism that can serve only as a rhetorical justification
and partial concealment of political fanaticism and terror. 31
A similar thesis had been propounded by C.F. de Volney
in 1794. Volney too lamented that "we have fallen into a
superstitious adoration of the Greeks and Romans." 32
Cults of antiquity which sprang up during the Revolution
and glorified selfless, Brutus-like tyrannicide suggested this
insight to many observers.ll The myth of ancient republics, Constant agreed, lent a deceptive aura oflegitimacy to
the abusive acts of the Committee of Public Safety: "it is in
the name of liberty that we have been given prisons, scaffolds and countless harassments." 34 The enormous power
of government over society was justified by an ideology
that, invoking ancient community, denied the modern distinction between state and society. During the Revolution,
in other words, the ideal of ancient liberty was a pretext for
oppression.l5 Constant conceded that many of the wouldbe "imitators of ancient republics" were propelled by generous motives.J6 They meant to abolish arbitrary government, seigneurial privileges, and the abuses of the Church.
Their tragic mistake was to have chosen the classical city as
an image unifying their diverse complaints against the ancien regime.
The French Revolution was not the first occasion on
which anticlerical and anti-aristocratic activists appealed to
classical republican ideals:
Since the renaissance of letters, most of those who attempted
to rescue man from the degradation into which he had been
plunged by the double curse of superstition and conquest [Roman Catholicism and aristocracy], believed it necessary to borrow institutions and customs favorable to liberty from the
ancients. 37
Though the image of classical republican freedom may
have been a useful rebuke to the old regime, it was not an
adequate guide to the future. The myth of the ancient city
could serve as a weapon in the assault on Catholicism and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the inequality of ranks, but it could furnish no clue about
how to replace them.JS Necessarily, attempts to resurrect
anachronistic forms of liberty were political hoaxes on a
grand scale.
The Problem
In modern times, Constant wrote, citizens can no longer
experience political participation as an intrinsically rewarding form of action.l9 But he also said that his contemporaries must learn to couple political participation, which he
described as a path to self-perfection, with individual privacy and independence.40 Which statement are we to believe? Was Constant simply being incoherent? Our perplexity is justified. But it can be dispelled if we examine
how the distinction between ancient and modern liberty
was used during two separate phases of Constant's career.
The 1819lecture contains long sections authored twenty
years earlier in response to exceptional political events. By
1819, the political scene had radically changed. Constant's
former left-wing enemies had vanished, only to be replaced
by equally intractable right-wing foes. In response to this
altered landscape, Constant reelaborated his distinction in
a new direction. No longer threatened by pseudo-democratic fraud, he turned sharply against the civic passivity
that served the interests of the ultras.41 But he left the
passages written years earlier untouched. No wonder
present-day readers feel off balance! Despite these findings, we cannot dismiss the 1819lecture as a jumble of conflicting insights. Constant was right to cling tenaciously to
both sides of his polemic: the atrophy of political life can be
just as perilous as a total repoliticization of society. Constant was struggling to understand the complexities of politics after the Revolution.
The Original Formulation
of the Distinction
A good deal has been written about the two concepts of
freedom and the corresponding democratic traditions.42
What has perhaps been neglected is the history of the distinction itself, especially the context in which it was originally elaborated and the problems to which it was initially
meant as a practical response.
The original version of the "Ancient and Modern Liberty" lecture can be found in Chapter Three of Mme de
Stael's Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer Ia revolution, a manuscript which was heavily influenced and
perhaps co-authored by Constant around 1798. Constant
and Mme de Stael wanted to convince the Directory that,
instead of merely playing off the Right against the Left, it
should appeal directly to a constituency of its own.
In times of political uproar, civic privatism can prevent
53
�individuals from assuming uncompromising postures associated with !'esprit de parti. The Directory never totally
succeeded in its attempt to arrest the. civil war. Thus, from
1793 until 1799, active participation in French politics
meant being drawn pell-mell into the fratricidal battle:
Even the slightest objection inspires hatred in the exalted par-
ties. This hatred compels every man to ally himself with a
number of his fellows and, just as men travel only in caravans
in places infested with brigands, so in countries where hatreds are unleashed, they align themselves with a party in order to have defenders.43
Constant's vindication of political absenteeism was intended as a reply to Rousseau's glorification of political
participation. He lauded citizen withdrawal and indifference in situations of civil war when participation was
largely a vehicle for partisan hatred and revenge. Civil war
had demonstrated the value of apolitical behavior in a
country "where two opposed parties combat each other
with furor." 44
Constant and Mme de Stael urged the Directory to
draw electoral support from just those individuals who had
remained aloof from the fighting in the years before. The
"inert" and '''{immobile" masses of the nation had views
that were admirably moderate because deeply apathetic_45
They were indifferent to royalty, but not enthusiastic
enough about the Republic to want it to disrupt the nation's tranquillity.46 They were unconcerned about the
fate of the ci-devant privileged caste, but they did not detest the old nobles intensely enough to wish to see them
persecuted_47 They knew that the persecution of even a
few embroils everyone, not merely the persecutors and the
persecuted.48
This majority "wants nothing but its own well-being."49
The desire for peace and prosperity may have signaled a
descent from the heights of antique virtue. But it had politically beneficial side-effects. Moreover, a commitment
to peace was exactly what one would have expected from
most Frenchmen.
Party spirit alm0st -1ilever exists except among individuals
thrown outside lthe.Cirde of domestic life. And two-thirds of
the population df France and of.all,the countries of Europe
are composed of men·.Who.-are·occupied solely with their pecuniary fortune. 50
In order to win the loyalty of these survival-minded
masses, the Directoire should respect their indifference to
politics. It must "never count, in such a nation, on the sort
of patriotism that propelled the ancient republics." 51 Instead of trying to win electoral support by stirring up enthusiasm, by asking citizens for heroic sacrifices of their
particular interests to the general good, the Directory
must acquiesce in individual contrariness. "Liberty today
is everything that guarantees the independence of citizens
from the power of the government." 52 To syphon away
54
votes from royalists and Jacobins, the Directory must offer
private security to its citizens.
De Stael's and Constant's aim in 1798 was to convince
the Directory that the stability of the Republic required an
abandonment of all the enthusiasm-promoting techniques
employed earlier by the clubs, the militant sectionnaires,
and the Convention:
Among the ancients ... in order to capture public opinion, it
was necessary to rouse the soul, to excite patriotism by conquest, by triumphs, by factions, even by troubles that nourished every passion. National spirit must no doubt be cultivated as much as possible within France. But we must not
lose sight of the fact that public opinion is based on a love of
peace, on the desire to acquire wealth and the need to conserve it and that we will always be more interested in administrative ideas than in political questions, because these touch
our private lives more directly_ 53
The majority of the French can have a moderating influence because they are largely indifferent to citizenship
and distracted from public affairs. Justly wary of the intoxicating effect of patriotism, the Directors should heed the
following maxim: "The sphere of each individual must always be respected." 54 To politicize modern individuals in
a total manner is next to impossible, and would be a mistake in any case. In 1798, distinguishing between ancient
and modern liberty meant praising apoliticism and urging
the government to hon<>r the primacy of private life.
The Lecture of 1819
Twenty years later, in 1819, Constant delivered his lecture at the Paris Atheneum. With the shift in the political
situation, the argumentative thrust of his distinction between ancient and modern liberty also changed. In the
France of 1819, there was no cult of.Sparta which Constant might have felt compelled to discredit. 55 There was
simply no threat of a resurgent Jacobinism by this time.
Constant's distinction between ancient and modern liberty has often been distorted by being mislocated exclusively in the context of 1793-1794. The Terror-which
Constant had not witnessed first-hand, for he only returned to France in 1795-provided an important motive
for his rethinking of eighteenth-century liberalism. But
the Directory, the Empire and the ultra-dominated Restoration all influenced his thought in decisive ways. The Directory taught him the insufficiency of "limited" gov.ennment, while Napoleon and the Bourbons helped revi¥eh's
underlyil)g rr~pul:ilicariism, temporarily suspended in the
convulsions of civil strife between 1793 and 1799. By 1819,
Constant had long broken with Guizot and other moderates, and he sat on the far left of the Chamber. Needless to
say, his ultraroyalist enemies never celebrated Rousseau
as a prophet of unlimited popular sovereignty; and as
WINTER/SPRING
1983
�Catholics, they liad·only the faintests)>mpatl!ty, £mr. pagan
antiquity.
•
Constant began his lecture with a "demonstration," following Montesquieu and Rousseau, that the representative system was
discovery of the moderns." 56 He used
the contrast with the direct self-government of the classical city to highlight the uniqueness of representative government. But he did not reduce the modern rupture with
the past to this contrast.
At the opening of the lecture, in a section that did not
appear before 1819, he opposed representation to oligarchic usurpation, not to democratic participation. The representative system was a discovery of the moderns: it was a
technique invented by the Third Estate for putting limits
on that "oligarchy whiclr is the same throughout the centuries."57 At the time, Constant's assertion that representative government is the "only system" that allows modern
men to attain freedom and social peace was immediately
understood as an argument against the ultra program to
reverse the relatively liberal Electoral Law of 1817.
Reminiscent of the regime of the ancient Gauls, the system the ultras wished to impose on modern France also
resembled the constitution of ancient Sparta. A small elite,
the Ephors of Sparta, possessed religious as well as political functions. They had powers to check and limit
the kings. But they also enjoyed executive authority.
They could easily become threats instead of restraints.
They were, in fact, not democratic representatives at all,
"not ... men invested with a mission comparable to that
which election today confers on the defenders of our freedoms." 58 The feudal aristocracy of priests and warriors
idealized by the ultras resembled the Ephors in many respects. Under the ancien regime, "the nobility possessed
privileges that were both insolent and oppressive. And the
people were without rights or guarantees." 59
Shrewdly structured, this argument was calculated simultaneously to entice and to befuddle the antidemocratic sentiments of the French Right. Every royalist had
to applaud the concession that modern France could
never be governed by direct popular self.rule. But the reason why the government established by the Charte 60 was
unlike that of the turbulent classical republics was also the
reason why it was distinct from the Catholic, monarchical,
and aristocratic system of the old regime.
Constant shrewdly replaced Montesquieu's contrast between modern monarchies and ancient republics by a new
contrast, discomfiting to the ultras, between representative and nonrepresentative regimes. Such a contrast had
the embarrassing effect of aligning the Catholic Bonald
with the most radical proponents of pagan democracy.
Taunting the Right, Constant juxtaposed absolute democracy with absolute monarchy.
The parallel drawn between the organization of the ancient city and the social program of the ultras was not
merely negative. More was involved than a shared denial
of the modern principle of representation. In both cases,
"a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Constant discerned a bias against voluntariness, against
entrusting social choices to unsupervised individuals.
With one eye fixed on the Catholic ultraroyalists, Constant mentioned the power of ancient Roman authorities
to meddle in matters of divorce and marriage. Reflecting
on the ultra education program,, he also remarked that
modern theocrats agreed with ancient republicans: a government should "take possessi<m of the generations being
born" and shape them to. its• own pleasure.6l When he said
(also about Rome) that "les lois reglent les moeurs," 62
his real target was the ultra-not merely Jacobin-idea
that the state should assume the duty of policing private
morality.
In mounting his attack on the French Right, Constant
also focused on religious toleration. There were obvious
differences between ancient civic religions and the modern alliance between throne and altar. Both could, however, be contrasted with a liberal decision to make religion
a private matter: "the ability to choose one's own cult, an
ability that we regard as one of our most precious rights,
would have seemed a crime and a sacrilege to the ancients."63 Distant from antiquity and inhospitable to the
vision of the Social Contract, modern Frenchmen cannot
reconcile themselves to the regimental designs of the theocratic Right. It is not altogether surprising that "the gallant
defenders of doctrinal unity cite the laws of the ancients
against foreign gods and support the rights. of the Catholic
Church with the example of the Atheuians."M These and
other parallels between the ancieNts and' the lilltras were
innovations of 1819. They did not appear in Constant's
earlier discussions of the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty. They betray the immediate;;political objectives of his lecture.
In their interpretations of the Revoluti<m,.Jacobins and
royalists agreed that the Terror had been'necessary to the
demolition of the old regime. Ever since his early pam·
phlet, Effets de Ia terreur (1798),65 Constant had rejected
this shared premise of the Left and Right. He had sought
to disconnect liberty from an incriminating association
with bureaucratic murder. An obvious way to disjoin freedom from the Terror was to split "freedom" in two. One
form (call it ancient liberty) could be found guilty, while
the other (call it modern) would come out innocent. Con·
stant had this strategy in mind in the Circonstances actuelles of 1798 where, together with Mme de Stael, he initially worked out the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty. Throughout the Restoration, moreover,
Constant's need to outmaneuver the ultras led him to
stress the politically harmless aspects of modern freedom. ·
He often wrote of "Ia liberte legale," "Ia liberte constitutionnelle," and "Ia liberte reguliere."66 He tended to discuss freedom in minimalist terms: by liberty he meant the
strict execution of the Charte. 67
But, although Constant no longer felt threatened by the
Jacobins in 1819, he was becoming increasingly exasperated wittin the: ultras. His desire to appease their fears was
55
�evaporating quickly. This turn of events helps explain his
new insistence that freedom from pditics, even if it never
functioned as a pretext for revoluticmary tyranny, was by
no means harmless.
By 1819, in fact, the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty had become Constant's way of exposing
the dangers inherent in his own commitment to civic pri·
vatism. His initial intention may have been to describe
modern liberty as innocent: it had had no role in inspiring
the Terror. But, at the end of his 1819lecture, his theoretical instincts and a changing political scene drew him toward criticizing modern liberty precisely because of its en·
couragement of apathy. Thus, the concluding thesis of the
1819 lecture was this: "Because we are more distracted
from political liberty than [the ancients] were able to be,
and in our ordinary condition less passionate about it, it
can happen that we sometimes neglect too much, and al·
ways mistakenly, the guarantees that it ensures us."68
Constant's Cautious Renewal
of the Appeal to Antiquity
The final section of "Ancient and Modern Liberty"
comes as a surprise. After having devoted twenty dense
pages to his claim that modern peoples are exclusively at·
tuned to private independence and freedom from politics,
after having said that "nous ne pouvons plus jouir de Ia liberte des anciens," 69 and that "the liberty suitable to the
moderns is different from that which was suitable to the
ancients," 70 after all this, Constant abruptly changed his
emphasis: "So, Gentlemen, far from renouncing either of
the two types of freedom about which I have been speaking to you, we must, as I have demonstrated, learn to com·
bine the one with the other." 71
In the body of the lecture, composed in previous years
and geared to different situations, Constant made clear
that "the perpetual exercise of political rights" and "the
daily discussion of the affairs of state" offer "only trouble
and fatigue" to modern nations.72 But in the conclusion,
written in or around 1819, he wrote:
Political liberty, granted to all citizens without exception, al·
lows them to examine and study their most sacred interests,
enlarges their spirits, ennobles their thoughts and establishes
between them a sort of intellectual equality that makes up the
glory and power of a people. 73
The citizenship being praised in the concluding section of
the lecture is only a part-time affair. Nevertheless, we can·
not escape the impression that we are witnessing a dra·
matic alteration in Constanfs tone as well as a reversal in
his theoretical stance. Here, his endorsement of civic in·
volvement is unmistakable. That Constant, at the end of
his lecture, did not denigrate or repudiate political partici·
pation is obviously pertinent to the question of how anti-
56
democratic was his liberalism. But it is not easy to integrate these final pages with the earlier part of his
argument.
On closer inspection, it turns out that two distinct para·
doxes preside over the jolting conclusion of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty." First, there is an inconsistency between
Constant's pessimistic and his optimistic assessments of
popular influence on the government in a modern state.
Modern citizens are said to have no influence on their gov·
ernments. But their active participation is also described
as decisive. Second, there is a flat contradiction between
Constant's claims that: (i) in modern societies, political lib·
erty is a means, while civil liberty is the end, that is, participation is valuable only as a guarantee to ensure private security from government harassment (this distinguishes
modern from ancient participation); and (ii) active civic in·
volvement is valuable in itself; it is an opportunity for soar·
ing above petty individual concerns and furthering self.
perfection.
Viewed separately, both paradoxes seem quite baffling.
Taken together, however, each not only illuminates the
other but also helps explain the structure of the lecture's
conclusion.
Consider the contrast between the pessimistic and the
optimistic assessments of popular influence on modern
governments. Constant's pessimism here echoes Rous·
seau's remark74 that the English are free only once every
several years and solely during the few minutes it takes to
vote; otherwise they are slaves:
Among the moderns ... even in the states which are most
free, the individual, although independent in private life, is
not sovereign except in appearance. His sovereignty is restrained, almost always suspended; and if he exercises this
sovereignty at fixed but infrequent intervals, during which
time he is still surrounded by precautions and obstacles, it is
only to abdicate it75
Constant accepted Rousseau's claim that democratic selfgovernment is impossible in a large country. But he
refused to imitate Rousseau's wholesale rejection of repre·
sentative government on the British model.
Constant decided to adapt himself, without undue ag·
ony, to the new political and extrapolitical possibilities
available in a society incapable of direct democracy. From
a realistic point of view, the marginal contribution of the
average modern individual to any political outcome is
close to zero: "the individual's influence ... is lost in a
multitude of influences." 76 Hence, we should expect most
men to turn their backs on citizenship and devote them·
selves to more rewarding, creative and enjoyable forms of
conflict or cooperation. From Constant's perspective in
1819, however, there was a serious flaw in a way of think·
ing that encouraged men to channel all their energies into
private life. French history had by that time unambigu·
ously demonstrated that civic absenteeism can serve the
cause of tyrants and oppressors. What had been thrown
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�into question was the standard liberal argument that commercial life provides an effective counterweight to excessive political authority. "The progress of industry ... creates for each individual a sphere within which are
concentrated all his interests; and, if the individual looks
outside this sphere, it is only by accident." 77 But when
modern citizens become too absorbed in their private financial business and fail to keep watch over the political
scene, the ambitious few will amass uncontrollable quantities of power.78 Once this has happened, private wealth
will itself be insecure.
Constant believed that economic independence was a
precondition for political influence. Political liberty presupposed civil liberty. He also affirmed the inverse claim:
without effective political influence, economic independence and decentralization cannot be guaranteed. This
second proposition cannot be called a political argument
against capitalism, but it is an insight into the troublesome
political consequences of business-mindedness and the
spirit of commerce.
The historical experiences behind this liberal distrust of
apoliticism were manifold. Just as important to Constant
as the ultra program to limit the franchise was the atrophy
of political life under the Empire. Napoleon had encouraged a withering away of active citizenship in order to consolidate his power.79 He had initially gained popular support for his coup d'etat because many citizens were weary
of the pseudo-republican antics of the Directory. 80 Thus,
the post-revolutionary urge to escape from politics and to
delimit the political sphere had nourished an invasive dictatorship. Constant experienced the pang of enforced depoliticization in his own person when he was ejected from
the Tribunat in 1802. It is inconceivable that, having suffered this humiliation, he would have afterwards viewed
privatization as simply and exclusively a public good.
Constant's argument here might be interpreted as a
democratic rethinking of a dilemma faced earlier by
French aristocrats. In the eighteenth century, the "resurgent nobility" realized they had made a poor bargain when
they sacrificed their political power to Richelieu and Louis
XIV for the sake of cozy privileges and immunities. Without power, their new rights were insecure. 81 Private independence can only be guaranteed by political responsibility. Constant echoed this point, with one major difference.
He wished political rights distributed "to all citizens without exception." 82
To provide his argument with a form more arresting to
modern readers, Constant resorted to a financial comparison. 83 A rich man may, in order to gain time for other
activities hire a manager to handle his fiscal affairs. In
any such' arrangement there comes a point when asaving
time" will be carried too far. A manager left completely
unsupervised may defraud the owner. In the long run, delegating one's power is not necessarily an efficient way to
save time. Like businessmen, citizens must keep themselves carefully informed in order to judge whether their
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
delegated business is being handled honestly and intelligently:
The peoples who recur to the representative system in order
to enjoy the liberty that is suitable to them must exercise a
constant and active surveillance over their representatives.
They must reserve to periods which are not separated by long
intervals the right to dismiss these representatives if they
have betrayed their vows and to revoke any powers they have
abused. 84
Not so enjoyable as the first-hand despoiling, exiling, imprisoning, and executing available to the ancient citizen,
this dismissing and revoking preserved some of the responsibilities of ancient citizens within modern constitutional
government.
From an individual's viewpoint, the importance of his
own civic participation seems negligible and almost imaginary. In the aggregate, however, a participating and well
informed citizen body can certainly prevent the return of
a Napoleon or, more likely in 1819, the gradual confiscation of all political power by the ultras.
There may be no contradiction in Constant's argument.
But there is a problem. The liberal dilemma was how to
motivate individuals to participate, how to galvanize them
into civic activism, given the scant rewards each individual
might expect from time expended on political affairs: "the
danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence and in the pursuit of
our particular interests, we will renounce too easily our
right to share in political power." 85 Civic privatism is a
danger because individuals will be more impressed by the
shorter-term gains than by the longer-term dangers of
apoliticism. Rational calculation leads citizens to see that
they can personally have no "real influence" on political
events,86 and thus may inadvertently encourage them to
expose their polity to dictatorship.
Constant understood that his instrumental argument
for civic involvement (that private rights can only be guaranteed by popular power, that independence will only be
ensured by participation) was not sufficient to rouse men
from the civic sedation administered first by Napoleon
and more recently by the ultra party. Partly because of his
recognition of the insufficiency of the instrumental argument for civic involvement, Constant overturned the previously worked-out logic of his lecture (a logic reflecting his
radically different concerns of 1798) and introduced an
Aristotelian and almost romantic justification of participation. Even apart from its terrible consequences, Constant
concluded, privatism cannot satisfy individuals, even if it
might make them happy. Men could reach bonheur simply
by abandoning their strenuous ideals and sinking into passivity. But happiness was not enough:
No, Gentlemen, I call to witness this better part of our nature,
the noble restlessness that pursues and torments us, this ardor to extend our understanding and develop our faculties.
57
�Our destiny does not call us to!ha)lplness<,:\Jt:>n€,chlill' to'silfperfecbon; and political liberty• isi t!Te< trtosttpoWefhll anti<the
most energetic means of self-J:l'effecHon :'granted us ;.by
heaven. 87
;
Except for "torment" and ainquietude," this passage carefully echoes classical arguments according to which man is
a fundamentally political animal. In radical contrast to the
body of the lecture, it implies that the more time modern
citizens spend on public affairs, the more free they will
feel.
In 1798, when the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty was first elaborated, Constant was still
haunted by the experience of the Revolution and ,espeCially by the idea that political participatimrumeamhnvolvement in plots for Tevenge. He thus viewed patriotic fer·
mentation with a nervous eye. In 1819, by contrast, the
ultra threat caused Constant and his liberal allies to re·
verse their earlier position and speak warmly of "pure, pro·
found, and sincere patriotism," a sentiment capable of en·
nobling the spirits of "tous les citoyens, sans exception." 88
Not merely a means to civil liberty, political liberty was
also seen as an mtegral part of civil liberty. Constant con·
eluded by suggesting that "the greatest possible number of
citizens" must be given influence over public affairs and
admitted to important political functions. Inclusion in
such tasks will give citizens "both the desire and the capac·
ity to perform them." 89 This is the sort of thinking which
~ve!'tually led to the acceptance of universal suffrage as an
mdispensable baSlS for representative government.
The strikingly democratic conclusion to "Ancient and
Modern Liberty" remains puzzling until we understand
how the underlying logic of the argument of 1798 was
adapted to meet the demands of Restoration politics. The
lecture is a palimpsest. It is so complex because it was composed twice, the second version superimposed on the first
after an interval of twenty years. By 1819, Constant's origi·
nal fear of convulsive patriotism had had to make room for
his hope that enhanced civic participation might advance
hberal causes or at least keep the ultras in check.
Civic Privatism and its Problems
The foregoing analysis of the two layers of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty" fails to do justice to the theoretical con·
tent of the lecture. After all, it was Constant's conscious
decision to weave his new and old concerns into a single
pattern of thought. "Ancient and Modern Liberty" gains
its importance from his crucial insight that both the loss of
civic spirit and the revival of civic spirit contain a potential
for tyranny. The right to be distracted from politics is pre·
ClOUS, b!-'t it iS not harmless. 0verprivatization and overpohbCiZahon are symmetncal dangers. The pluralistic and
voluntary pattern oflife to which modern citizens have become accustomed makes us intolerant of societies in
58
which• there are no sharply-etched limits to the political.
Butc·every time we draw such boundaries;-we' seal off im<poltanliiiteasofsotiallife from respiill!iible pi'.blic surveillance and coilttol.-:NaP<?-[eon- craftily used civic privatism
to escape accountability:9° 'The' liberal boundaries of the
political are simultaneously indispensable and fraught
with risk.
This idea is not a palinode or sign of Constant's irresolute _vacillation. It is an insight into the complexity of polihcs m France after the Revolubon. Ultimately, Constant's
success at keeping such ostensibly conflicting ideas simultaneously alive is what makes his thought about •this period so fascinating.
Unusable and even dangerous as a •constructive principle, ancient liberty is helpful as a reminder oflthe central
peril of modern liberty. His sense of this periiJmlly well• be
why Constant was so careful to label participation in-sovereignty a form ofliberty in the first place. Morlll'!squieu'l'iatl
warned against confounding the sovereign 'tptl\iver'\ 6fc•a
people with its '1iberty," and de Lolme adopted thiN·:nne
distinction between freedom and power.9l
Cons_tant's decision to deviate from those who defined
liberty by contrasting it with the exercise of sovereignty
was not casual. He insisted from the start that the influence of citizens on legislation was a form of freedom. He
did not allow active political rights to stand on the sidelines
as a mere alternative to freedom. This refusal to set popular power aside may also illuminate the ending of the 1819
lecture, the apparent contradiction between the notion
that political liberty is exclusively a guarantee and the idea
that it is also a vehicle for self-perfection. By calling popular power a form of freedom, Constant prepared the way
for his conclusion: freedom from politics is not coextensive with liberty. True liberty is an "optimal mix" of public
and private, participation and nonparticipation, citizenship and mdependence, activism and distraction, cooperation and eccentricity. 92
Those who accept Isaiah Berlin's portrait of a privacyaddicted Constant cannot explain why he devoted the last
fifteen years of his life to public service. To be sure the
politics to which he gave himself unstintingly was ~ot a
town-meeting sort of communalism. It was a radical reformist activism. If it was politics with the aim of limlting
politics, it was politics nonetheless. The price of modern
liberty is eternal vigilance. Anti-utopian but reformminded participation was crucial for Constant. In the
Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri of 1822, he was
unrelenting about the importance of political citizenship.
In explaining why England was a powerful nation despite
its absurd commercial law, he wrote:
The political institutions, the parliamentary discussions, the
liberty of the press which [England] has enjoyed without interruption for one hundred and twenty-six years have counteracted the vices of its laws and its governments. Its inhabitants maintain their energy of character because they have not
been disinherited of their participation in the administration
WINTER/SPRING
i983
�of public affairs. This participation, while it is almost imaginary, gives the citizens a feeling of their importance that fosters their activity.93
Spain, by contrast, reveals the dismal fate of a country
where individuals lose interest in themselves because they
are deprived of any chance to influence their own fate:
Spain's "decadence dates from the destruction of its political liberty and the suppression of the cortes."94
Participation in politics, as advocated by the later Constant, was not limited to the periodic surveillance and
controle of the legislators by the electors. It cannot be reduced to a means by which private citizens could defend
their security, goods and jouissances. 95 Constant argued
that concern for the public good was also creative of energetic characters and even national identity. For him, poli- ·
tics was an engrossing passion. He merely wanted to make
sure that it was voluntary, not obligatory. A voluntary politics of reform (based on ideals of civilized humanity) is certainly one of the central possibilities made available by
modern liberty.
We should not, however, allow Constant to give a more
glamorous portrait of the ancient component in modern
liberty than he gave of ancient liberty itself. Constant admitted that he was sometimes bored with public service,
and he never gave flattering accounts of his reasons for
persisting in office. In a revealing letter written in 1800,
when he was first appointed to the Tribunal, he distinguished sharply between happiness and self-perfection,
just as he was to do at the conclusion of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty." He had pursued a political career, he
said:
not as a pleasure-is there any such thing in life?-but as a
task, as an opportunity to fulfill a duty, which is the only thing
able to lift the burden of doubt, of memory, of unrest-the
eternal lot of our transitory nature. Those for whom pleasure
has charms, for whom novelty still exists, and who have preserved the happy faculty of enjoyment, do not need a vocation; but those who have lost their physical and moral youth
must have a distinct mission to do good in order not to sink
into discouragement and apathy. 96
Constant was only thirty-three when he wrote this letter.
Decrepitude was his society's, not his personal, plight. Victimized by an excess of civilization, modern men are incapable of bonheur. The best they can hope for is to quell
their nagging inquietude. Living in a disillusioned age,
Constant decided to call such escapism by the name of
"self-perfection." Idealizing politics was politically useful
in his battle against the ultras.
Modern Imitators of Ancient Republics
Taine, heir to the counterrevolutionary tradition, argued that the Terror was a logical consequence of Enlightenment thought.97 This conservative thesis has been so
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
widely influential that its implausible character is often
lost from sight: if eighteenth-century liberalism leads necessarily to revolutionary dictatorship and murder, then
only the illiberalism of the old regime can sustain social
freedom.
Constant had a different view. The Terror, he thought,
did not result from an excess of freedom. On the contrary,
"the evils of the Revolution stemmed precisely from the
Revolution's having suspended allliberty."98 The liberty
suspended during the Terror had little or no resemblance
to the old aristocratic freedoms which had been sharply
curtailed during the consolidation of French absolutism.
The liberty violated by the Terror was a constitutionally
regulated liberty. It included civil rights, religious tolerance, legal equality, and the political influence of the
Third Estate. Unlike Taine, in other words, Constant saw
no difficulty in criticizing the Terror with categories inherited from the Enlightenment. The 1793-1794 phase of the
Revolution was marked by intolerant fanaticism, secular
priest-craft, and a conflation of the social and the political.
The Jacobins claimed to be establishing a new republic
based on virtue; but they actually recreated a despotism
based, as Montesquieu said all despotisms were, on fear.
Constant never accused the Terrorists of an overexuberant commitment to reason and equality. Rather than
pointing an accusing finger at the Enlightenment, he focused on the revolutionary appeal to classical republican
ideals,99 an appeal that served as a pretext for oppression,
misleading the public and to some extent deluding the oppressors. In so doing he relied explicitly on an Enlightenment mistrust of political recidivism. I00
Robespierre and Saint-Just, who in the crisis of 1793 had
resurrected the Roman institution of emergency dictatorship, were the most notorious modern imitators of ancient
republics. They were not squeamish about using violence
against their real or imagined enemies:
These men thought they could exercise political power as it
had been exercised in the free states of antiquity. They believed that even today everything must yield to the collective
authority and that private morality must fall silent before the
public interest. 101
Robespierre's addiction to Plutarch and Rousseau should
not be overestimated. But his admiration for the ancients
certainly contributed to his self-image as a great moral legislator and founder of a new order.IOZ The classical tradition of civic virtue provided a language in which he could
misdescribe the Revolution and stress the paramount
need for self-sacrifice on the part of all citizens. One of
his favorite exhortations was: "evelons nos ames it Ia hauteur des vertus republicaines et des examples antiques." 103
"Sparta," he rapturously remarked, "shines like a lightning
flash in the immense darkness." 104 "! speak of public virtue," he added in yet another speech, "which worked such
wonders in Greece and Rome and must produce even
more astonishing good in republican France."IOS
59
�Characteristic of the ancient city, according to Constant, was the absence of inalienable rights.l 06 Rights were
not absolute but contingent upon service to the community. They could be legally revoked by the assembled populace.107 In search of justifications for the flagrant violations of judicial procedure involved in revolutionary
justice, the Jacobins were understandably attracted to this
ancient model for the morally impeccable revocation of
rights. Fot similar reasons, "the Spartans of the Convention"108 followed Rousseau in praising the absence of partial associations within the ancient city. Loyalty to family
or Church should never interfere with allegiante to the patrie. Robespierre could encourage the denunciation of
family members for uncivic attitudes and chide wives
whose husbands had been guillotined for harboring unpatriotic feelings. 109 Frenchmen should be exclusively political animals, at least so long as revolutionary government
was in effect. The Law of Suspects defined "treason" so
vaguely as to include boredom and indifference as crimes
against the state.llO Likewise, attendance at local assemblies and the assumption of public office was obligatory,
not voluntary. If you married a foreigner, said "monsieur"
instead of "citoyen/' or went to Church, some zealot
might accuse you of having harmed the public good.lll
This fervid assimilation of the social to the political and
the private to the public was justified by appeals to the
ancient city in which no line had been drawn between
state and society.
Citizenship, for Robespierre, had to be total: "love of
the patrie ... presupposes a preference for the public interest over all private interests." 112 But Robespierre did
not merely denounce conflicting interests. He refused to
admit the legitimacy of conflicting opinions about the
common good. He remarked that there are only two parties in the Convention, the pure and the corrupt.l13 A
crude dichotomy between base self-interest and noble virtue dominated the Robespierrist vision of political life. Patriots, he notoriously suggested, should be concerned with
virtue, not with material well-being.l 14 The same simplistic
dualism supported his near-hysterical attacks on the single
vast conspiracy of the egoistical and demon-driven aligned
against the Revolution.II5 It also underlay his project for
the reeducation of Frenchmen deformed by centuries of
superstition and oppression.l 16 Like a good Plutarchan legislator, ll7 Robespierre was less concerned about granting a
share of legislative authority to the people than with restoring their moral health: "the Legislator's first duty is to
form and preserve public morality."IIB His central aim was
to instill purity of soul into citizens by means of the Revolution: "We want an order in which all low and cruel passion shall be repressed and in which laws shall awaken all
the benevolent and generous passions."ll 9 Men can be inwardly refashioned by governmental edict. Vice can be
legislated out of existence.
For Constant, Robespierre had an absurdly exaggerated
idea of the capacity oflaw to make men morally pure. Con-
60
stant admired the American revolutionaries who were satisfied with a system in which ambition counteracted ambition. Robespierre, by contrast, aspired to create an order
"in which the only ambition is to deserve fame and serve
the country." 120 Instead of rechanneling private vice for
public benefit, he wished to eradicate vice and enthrone
virtue in its stead.
According to Constant, it was this unbelievable attempt
to "improve" men against their will and to resurrect a vir~
tue-based polity on the ancient model that produced the
most gruesome atrocities of the Terror: "The partisans of
ancient liberty became furious when modern individuals
did not wish to be free according to their method. They
redoubled the torments, the people redoubled its resistance, and crimes followed upon errors." 121 The gravest error of the Jacobins was not to have adapted themselves to
the general spirit 122 of the age:
When punishments that reason reserves for great crimes are
applied to actions that some members of society consider a
duty, and that the most honest of the contrary party regard as
indifferent or excusable, the legislator is obliged, in order to
sustain his first iniquity, to multiply indefinitely secondary
wrongs. In order to have a single tyrannical law executed, he
must compile an entire code of proscriptions and blood.123
Robespierre was simply out of touch with the realities of
modern France.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the most common complaint against the old regime was that it was a
holdover from a bygone age. At mid-century, the word
"revolution" had already begun to change its meaning
from going back to going forward. 124 As the Revolution got
underway, the attack on the old regime was conducted less
in the name of an ancient constitution and more in the
name of a desirable future. In this context, it was a skillful
coup de theatre to stamp the most progressive party with
the epithet "anachronism." Indeed, Constant's diagnosis
of the Revolution was part of his strategy of tarring the two
extremes of French politics with the same brush, and thus
of staking out a broad middle position for himself and his
allies. It also allowed him to attack the Terror without
abandoning the liberalism of the philosophes.
The Psychology of Revolution
Constant's most penetrating insight into the leaders of
the French Revolution was that their Rousseauism went
deeper than it first seemed. Rousseau admired Sparta but
was pessimistic about the chances for reviving ancient frugality and virtue in a corrupt modern world. Robespierre is
sometimes depicted as an optimist who tried to do what
Rousseau had declared impossible. But in fact Rousseauist
pessimism permeated the speeches of Robespierre from
1792 until his execution in 1794. 125 His last speech conWlNTER/SPRJNG
1983
�eluded with a typical suggestion that the Republic of Virtue is too good for this world: "The time has not yet come
when men of good will can serve their country unmolested."126 This half-admission that his own goals were impossible to achieve is the most Rousseauist element in
Robespierre's writings. Such a half-consciously perceived
discrepancy between extravagant goals and modest historical possibilities is what Constant had in mind in this sardonic commentary:
Nothing is stranger to observe than the speeches of the
French demagogues. Saint~Just 1 the cleverest among them,
composed all his speeches in short, compact sentences,
meant to jolt awake worn~out minds. Thus, while he appeared
to believe the nation capable of making the most agonizing
sacrifices, he recognized by his very style that it was incapable
even of paying attention.l27
In diagnosing the Revolution, Constant regularly returned
to this dedoublement revolutionnaire. Saint-Just's audience
was not asleep; it was frazzled and distracted. It suffered
from l'arriere pensee and other signs of excessive civilization which Constant later explored in his novel, Adolphe
(1816). Recall this warning of Adolphe: "woe to the man
who in the arms of the mistress he has just possessed, conserves a fatal prescience and foresees that he can abandon
her."l28 Adolphe's torment stemmed partly from his inability to throw himself into any action with complete
abandon. His painful lack of illusions was startlingly mirrored in a psychological portrait Constant painted of the
revolutionary crowd. Although modern individuals can become enthused about certain abstract ideas, they are unfitted for feeling enthusiasm toward particular men.
Adolphe and the French people share "une deplorable
prevoyance'':
The French Revolution was most remarkable in this respect.
Whatever has been said about the inconstancy of the people
in ancient republics, nothing equals the mobility we have wit-
nessed. If, during the outbreak of even the best-prepared upheaval, you watch carefully the obscure ranks of the blind and
subjugated populace, you will see that the people (even as it
follows its leaders) casts its glance ahead to the moment when
these leaders will fall. And you will discern within its artificial
exaltation, a strange combination of analysis and mockery.
The people will seem to mistrust their own convictions. They
will try to delude themselves by their own acclamations and
to reinvigorate themselves by jaunty raillery. They foresee! so
to speak, the moment when the glamor of it all will pass. 29
Constant attributed the savagery and violence of the Revolution to just this lack of conviction, to just this mobility:
"Insurrections among the ancients were much more sin-
cere than among ourselves."ll0 Bloodshed was a tactic
used by eviscerated men to compensate for a deficit of
powerful passions:
An artificial and contrived insurrection requires, apart from
the violence of the insurrection itself, the extra violence
TilE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
needed to set it in motion . ... During the Revolution, I saw
men organizing sham insurrections who proposed massacres
in order-as they put it-to give events a popular and national air.l 31
Void of conviction, but unable to tolerate a rudderless
state of mind, modern men become "pretendus republicains,"ll2 pseudo-zealots more odious and frenzied than
authentic zealots. Their hypocrisy was repellent:
Great sacrifices, acts of devotion, victories won by patriotism
over natural affections in Greece and Rome served among us
as pretexts for the most unbridled outbursts of individual passions. Noble examples were parodied in a miserable fashion.
Because, in earlier times, inexorable but just fathers had condemned their criminal children, modern imitators put their
own quite innocent enemies to death.133
Constant's general understanding of modern European
societies influenced and was influenced by his analysis of
the Revolution. Although he considered the Revolution
an episode in the moral advance toward legal equality, he
never neglected its chilling cruelty. And while he focused
intently on modern misuses of communitarian rhetoric, he
never denied the genuinely progressive outcome of the
Revolution. He thought that the disaster of the Jacobin experiment at legislating public morality revealed the utter
futility of trying to reverse. the course of social change.
The morals and manners of a skeptical, secular, and commercial society leave much to be desired. Legislative command cannot, however, recreate otiose forms of civic vir-
tue and communal belonging.
Because Constant wished to counter Rousseau's pernicious influence on the revolutionary generation and to deromanticize the classical city, he often emphasized the
brutal features of ancient liberty. Despite this tendency,
he was careful to say that the Greeks and the Romans provided the most stunning examples in human history of political freedom. Ancient republicanism, while harsh, was
not despotic. It is only in modern society that ancient freedom becomes a ploy for justifying oppression.l 34 Because
there were no significant boundaries of the political in the
ancient city, total citizenship was not experienced as a violation of the individual or as a restriction on his chances in
life. During the Revolution, by contrast, the ludicrous demand for certificats de civisme revealed how threatened authorities felt by the lukewarm commitment of citizens to
civic life.m Political absenteeism was perceived as treason, as an illicit evasion of the molding-power of a self.
appointed Legislative elite. The pluralism of modern society, including the "line" between state and society, first
made the ideal of ancient liberty into a possible pretext for
political tyranny.
1. "De la liberte des anciens comparee a celle des modemes," delivered
at the Paris Atheneum in 1819 and reprinted in Cours de politique consti·
tutionelle ou collection des ouvrages publies sur le gouvernement represen-
61
�tatif, edited by Eduoard Laboulaye, Paris 1872, val. 2, 539-560. Besides
this lecture, the basic texts in which Constant discusses the distinction
between ancient and modem liberty are Chilpters 6 through 8 of De
!'usurpation of 1814, reprinted in Cours de politique, val. 2, 204-217, and,
most important of all, Book 16 of the recently published manuscript, originally composed between 1802 and 1804, Les "Principes de politique" de
Benjamin Constant, edited by Etienne Hofmann, Geneva 1980, 419-45 5.
This early sketch of Constant's argument is itself a rewritten and expanded version of Chapter 3 of Mme de Stael's Des circonsfunces actuelles qui peuvent terminer la revolution, Geneva 1979, 106-112, a work
written around 1798, but left unpublished until the twentieth century.
We know that Constant actively collaborated on this manuscript. He was
certainly involved with the initial conception of the chapter in question
and can probably be considered its co-author. The actual degree of Constant's collaboration on Circonstances actuelles, however, will always remain a matter of dispute. Since Constant took whole sentences from the
book and simply transplanted them unrevised into his own published
works, we can assume he felt a proprietary attitude toward the manuscript of 1798. The relevant chapter also has a kind of Constantian ring
discordant with de Stael's ordinary tone. But there is room for legitimate
disagreement on this question. The answer to it is also of limited impor·
tance.
2. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, New Yark 1932, 78-97; Antoine Adam,
Grandeur and Illusion. French Literature and Society 1600-1715, New
York 1972, 142-164.
3. See Thomas Hobbes's dismissal of ancient liberty, Leviathan, Part
Two, ch. 21, Oxford 1965, 165; and David Hume, "Of the Populousness
of Ancient Nations," Essays. Moral, Political and Literary, Oxford 1963,
381-451. Cf. also Alexander Hamilton: "The industrious habits of the
people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain and devoted to
the improvements of agriculture and commerce, are incompatible with
the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the
people of those [ancient] republics." The Federalist Papers, New York
1961,69.
4. Compare the virtue-based ancient republic (discussed in Books IIVIII of De l'esprit des lois) with the English mixed regime (discussed
chiefly in Books XI and XII).
5. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, in Oeuvres completes, Paris 1951,
val. 2, 431 (Xll, 2).
6. Montesquieu, Esprit, 396 (XI, 5) and 354 (Vlll, 6).
7. Montesquieu, Esprit, 397 (XI, 6).
8. Montesquieu, Causes de la Grandeur des Romains, in Oeuvres completes, 119.
9. Montesquieu, Esprit, 363 (Vlll, 16).
10. Montesquieu, Esprit, 272 (1V, 8).
11. Montesquieu, Esprit, 269 (IV, 6).
12. Montesquieu, Esprit, 273 (1V, 8).
13. Montesquieu, Esprit, 252 (III, 3): "Les politiques grecs, qui vivoient
dans le gouvernement populaire, ne reconnoissient d'autre force qui pUt
les soutenir que celle de la vertu."
14. Montesquieu, Esprit, 303 (V, 19).
15. Max Weber, The City, New York 1958,220.
16. Montesquieu, Esprit, 274 (V, 2).
17. Montesquieu, Esprit, 362 (VIll, 16).
18. Montesquieu, Esprit, 252 (III, 3).
19. Montesquieu's definition of freedom as personal security (with no
reference to self-government or the satisfactions afforded participants in
a common endeavor) was echoed in Jaucourt's article on political liberty
in the Encyclopedie: "La liberte politique du citoyen est cette tranquillite
d'esprit que procede de I' opinion que chacun a de sa sfirete, & pour
qu'on ait cette sfirete, il faut que le gouvernement soit tel, qu'un citoyen
ne puisse pas craindre un citoyen." Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire
raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, val. 9, Neufchastel1765, 472.
20. Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, London 1807,
246.
21. Joseph Priestly, An Essay on the First Principles of Government and of
the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty, London 1768, 12-13,
62
54; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, London
1767, 92; Jean-Charles-Leonard Sismondi, Histoire des republiques italiennes du moyen-age, Paris 1809, val. 4, 369-370. These texts are all cited
in Guy Dodge, Benjamin Constant's Philosophy of Liberalism, Chapel
Hill1980, 43-44.
22. Cours de Politique, vol. 2, 539.
23. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
24. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
25. Les "Principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant, 432.
26. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty,
Oxford 1969, 118-172.
27. Some radically ascetic "noes" may not entail any "yeses," but this is
not the case with modem liberty.
28. "Principes de politique," 421-424.
29. Cours de Politique, val. 2, 556-557.
30. For this point I am indebted to Larry Siedentop, "Two Liberal Traditions" (in The Idea of Freedom, edited by Alan Ryan, Oxford 1979, 153174), though his contrast between French and British liberalism is uncon·
vincing because it requires the expulsion of Adam Smith from the British
tradition.
31. Cours de politique, val. 2, 213-217.
32. Constantin Franyois de Volney, Lecons d'histoire, in Oeuvres com·
pletes, Paris 1846, 592.
33. Robert L. Herbert, David, Brutus, Voltaire and the French Revolution, New York 1972.
34. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 217.
35. Constant's analysis of the masks worn by "modem imitators of ancient republics" was echoed thirty-five years later in Karl Marx's discussion of the role played by Roman costumes and Roman phrases in the
great French Revolution. (Karl Marx, ''Der achtzehnte Brumaire de
Louis Bonaparte," Marx-Engels Werke, Berlin 1978, val. 8, 116.) Curiously
enough, in the very same passage where Marx tacitly repeated Constant,
he explicitly said that Constant was another bourgeois propagandist unaware that "ghosts from the days of Rome'' had watched over the demoli·
tion of feudalism in France. Marx's principal point, in any case, was that
history had instructed the French Revolutionaries to create bourgeois society, and that they had to drug themselves to the banality of their task.
They mouthed public-spirited slogans and struck patriotic poses borrowed from ancient citizens. Marx went on to predict that the proletarian
revolution would be quite different. It would be truly heroic, neither re·
quiring nor admitting any form of self-deception. Unlike Marx, Constant
did not believe the emergence of revolutionary cults of antiquity could
be traced to the cunning of reason. He thought that the Jacobin fixation
on classical virtue was a contingent fact: it was caused by the classical
education of middle class French elites and especially by the paucity of
alternative languages available for attacking royalism and religious orthodoxy.
36. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 548-549.
37. "Principes de politique," 420.
38. Cf. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens. A Study of Rousseau's Social
Theory, Cambridge 1969.
39. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 555.
40. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 559-560.
41. The ultraroyalists or extreme reactionary party already began to
make fierce recriminations against Louis XVIII for his concessions to
constitutional government in 1814. They were Constant's principal adversaries for the last fifteen years of his life.
42. Cf. George Sabine, "Two Democratic Traditions," Philosophical Re·
view, 61, October 1952,451-474.
43. Mme de Stael, Circonstances actuelles, 106.
44. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 106.
45. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 106.
46. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, l 07.
47. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 107.
48. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 107.
49. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 108.
50. Mme de Stael, Circonstances. 109.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 110.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 111.
Mme de Stael. Circonstances, 111.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 111.
John Plamenatz, The Revolutionary Movement in France 1815-71,
London 1952, 21-22.
56. Cours de politique, val.
57. Cours de politique, val.
58. Cours de politique, val.
59. Cours de politique, val.
2, 540.
2, 540.
2, 540.
2, 540.
60. The new constitution of 1814, regally "granted" to the nation by
Louis XVIII, retained the Civil Code, and recognized legal equality, religious toleration, and the right of purchasers of "national lands" to keep
their property. To understand the liberal-ultra battles of the Restoration,
it is important to note that the Charter was a blatantly ambiguous document which, for instance, did not make clear how power was to be apportioned between the king and the Chambers. Guillaume de Bertier de
Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration, Philadelphia 1966,65-72.
61. Cours de politique, val. 2, 554.
62. Cours de politique, val. 2, 542.
63. Cours de politique, val. 2, 542.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 553.
Reprinted in Cours de politique, val. 2, 53-69.
Cours de politique, vol. I, 17, 180.
Cours de politique, val. l, 173.
Cours de politique, val. 2, 556.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 556; see also 557.
Cours de politique, val. 2, 560.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 545-546.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 559.
Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, edited by Bernard Gagne bin et Marcel
Raymond, Paris 1964, vol. 3, 430.
75. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 542.
76. Cours de politique, val. 2, 553.
77. Benjamin Constant, Commentaire sur l'ouvrage cfe Fi[angieri, Paris
1824, vol. 2, 182-183.
78. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. Political Argu, ments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton 1977, 123-124.
79. Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon, Princeton 1981,87.
80. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 552.
81. Franklin Ford, Robe and Sword. The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XN, New York 1965, 19.
82. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
83. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
84. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
85. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
86. Cours de politique, val. 2, 547.
87. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
88. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
89. Cours de politique, val. 2, 560.
90. In the manuscripts of 1802-1804, written under the shadow of Napoleon, we find: "lorsqu'il n'y a dans un pays libre ni liberte de la presse, ni
droits politiques,le peuple se detache entierement des affaires publiques.
Toute communication est rompue entre les gouvernants et le gouvernes.
L'autorite, pendant quelque temps, et les partisans de l'autorite peuvent
regarder cela comme un avantage. Le gouvernement ne rencontre point
des obstacles. Rien ne le contrarie. II agit librement mais c'est que lui seul
est vivant et que la nation est morte." Les "Principes de politique" de Ben·
jamin Constant, 137. The liberal constitutionalism Constant advocated
was obviously not intended to detach citizens entirely from public affairs.
91. Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, London 1807,
245. Referring specifically to the French revolutionaries and their followers, Edmund Burke employed a similar distinction: he wrote that "the
right of the people is almost always confounded with their power." Reflections on the Revolution in France, London 1969, 153.
92. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Cambridge, Mass. 1970,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
30-43. Constant, however, was thinking of "interdependence" rather
than a mere "mixture."
93. Commentaire, Paris 1822, vol. 1, 73.
94. Commentaire, vol. 1, 72.
95. According to Isaiah Berlin, Constant defended democratic selfgovernment "only for the reason ... that without it negative liberty may
be too easily crushed." Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1969, xlvii.
96. Letter to Mme de Nassau, 20 January 1800, cited and translated by
Elizabeth Schermerhorn, Benjamin Constant, New York 1970, 183.
97. Hippolyte Taine, The Ancient Regime, New York 1876.
98. Melanges de litterature et de politique, Brussels 1829, vol. 1, 68.
99. As Gay and others have stressed, the appeal to antiquity was only one
aspect of the Enlightenment tradition; and it was counterbalanced by a
belief that, in many domains, the moderns had outstripped the ancients.
100. In his essay "Of Refinement in the Arts," Hume wrote: "To declaim against present times, and magnify the virtue of remote ancestors,
is a propensity almost inherent in the human mind." Essays, Oxford
1963, 285.
101. "Principes de politique," 438.
102. "During a conversation in which [Robespierre] attacked the representative system, it is reported that, asked what he would put in its place,
he replied, 'Celui de Lycurge.' " Alfred Cobban, "The_ Political Ideas of
Robespierre during the Convention," Aspects of the French Revolution,
New York 1968, 186; consider also R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Demo·
cratic Revolution, Princeton 1964, val. 2, 124.
103. Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, edited by Laponneraye, New
York 1970, vol. 3, 518.
104. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 608; but also see vol. 3, 194, where Ro·
bespierre notes of Sparta that "this nation of austere republicans has
nothing in common with a nation of 25 million men." Robespierre was
flexible enough that, in order to attack the sectionnaires and the Commune, he often reversed himself and denounced urban self-government
on the ancient model.
105. Robespierre, Oeuvres, 3, 544.
106. This thesis has found a subtle defender in Michel Villey, Leqons
d'histoire de Ia philosophie du droit, Paris 1962, 221-250.
107. According to Moses Finley, "Classical Greeks and Republican Romans possessed a considerable measure of freedom, in speech, in political debate, in their business activities, even in religion. However, they
lacked, and would have been appalled by, inalienable rights. There were
no theoretical limits to the power of the state, no activity, no sphere of
human behavior in which the state could not legitimately intervene provided the decision was properly taken for any reason that was held to be
valid by a legitimate authority." The Ancient Economy, London 1973,
154-155.
108. Melanges de litterature et de politique, vol. 1, 68.
109. Norman Hampson, The Social History of the French Revolution, To·
ronto 1965, 223.
110. "Suspicion was directed not only towards probable authors of acts
already committed, on grounds of definite circumstances susceptible of
discussion and of proof, but also towards the possible perpetrators of
eventual crimes, who were believed capable of them because of their
opinions or even their real or simulated indifference." George Lefebvre,
The French Revolution, London 1968, vol. 2, 118.
111. Fran~ois Furet and Denis Richet, The French Revolution, New
York 1970, 188-189.
112. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 514.
113. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 698 and 612.
114. Norman Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, London 1974, 139 and 173.
115. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 551.
116. On the execution of Louis XVI as an attempt to furnish a republican re-education for the miseducated French nation, see Michael
Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, Cambridge 1974, 1-89.
117. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus "bred up his citizens in such a way
that they neither would nor could live by themselves; they were to make
themselves one with the public good, and, clustering like bees around
63
�their commander, be by their zeal and public spirit carried all but out of
themselves, and devoted wholly to their country." The Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans, New York n.d., 69. ·
118. Robespierre, Oeuvres, voL 1, 156.
119. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 541.
120. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 541.
121. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 213.
122. For Montesquieu's idea of the "general spirit" of a country or age,
see De l'esprit des lois, Book XIX, chapters four and five.
123. Des Suites de Ia contre-revolution de 1660 en Angleterre, 56-57.
124. Consider the two uses of the word "revolution" at the beginning of
Turgot's "A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind," On Progress, Sociology and Economics, edited by R. L. Meek,
Cambridge 1973,41-42. See also Felix Gilbert, "Revolution," Dictionary
of the History of Ideas, New York 1973, vol. 4, 152-163.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, 13 3-134.
Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 736.
Les "Principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant, 432.
Adolphe in Oeuvres, edited by Alfred Roulin, Paris, 1964, 32.
"Principes de politique," 434.
"Principes de politique," 620.
"Principes de politique," 620.
"Principes de politique," 86.
133. "Principes de politique," 438.
134. This caveat distinguishes Constant's position from the views ad·
vanced by Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols., Princeton
1966.
135. M. J. Sydenham, The French Revolution, New York 1966, p. 178;
Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, 198.
SIXTEEN EIGHTEEN
'Why do these gentlemen wish to throw me out
Of the window?' asked an obscure Bohemian secretary
Before he was unexpectedly exfenestrated and miraculously saved
By a pile of castleyard rubbish or an angel of God.
Thus he was flung into History, and with his fall
Introduced three decades of winter, delusion and warThe occasional Adam, perplexed and resurrected, to remind us
That the innocent often are incidentally in castles.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
64
WIN1ER/SPRING 1983
�Mark Aldanov
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907:
the ''Exes ''
from The Suicides
translated by Joel Carmichael
The following section comes from Mark Aldanov's last novel,
The Suicides, that appeared in Russian in Western Europe in 1958
after his death in 1957-but has never been published in English.
Bom in 1886 in Kiev, Mark Alexandrovich Landau (Aldanov was
his pen name) won prizes in secondary school for his accomplish~
ments in Greek and Latin. By 1910 he had earned degrees in law
and natural sciences from the University of Kiev and published a
monograph in organic chemistry. Untill917 he lived in St. Petersburg. In some sense the Bolshevik seizure of power in October
made him into an artist and a Russian: he began to write journalism and then novels after he left Russia forever in March 1919. He
wrote first of all in the Russian language press abroad for the more
than two million Russians in exile by 1922. But his novels and
essays also won a wide audience in Europe except the Soviet Union
and the United States. Throughout much of his life he continued
his scientific work. In exile he lived mostly in France but also in
Berlin for a few years and during the Second World War in New
York. He was, he used to say, the only Russian writer abroad who
managed to live from his pen-with difficulty. The following novels of Aldanov have appeared in English: The Ninth Thermidor
(1923); The Devil's Bridge (1925); Saint Helena, Little Island;
The Escape (1932); For Thee the Best (1940); Before the Deluge
(1950); To Live as We Wish (1952); Nightmare and Dawn (1957),
For Aldanov see C. Nicholas Lee, The Novels of Mark Alexandrovich Aldanov, The Hague, Mouton 1968; "Mark Aldanov: Russia, Jewry, and the World," Midstream, March 1981, 41-46.
The Suicides begins with the Social Democratic Congress in
Joel Carmichael translated the memoirs ofN. N. Sukhanov (The Russian
Revolution 1917, Oxford 1952), the only full-length eyewitness account
of the February and October events in Russia in 1917. His essay, "The
Lost Continent, the Conundrum of Christian Origins," appeared in the
Autumn-Winter 1982-83 issue of the St. John's Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Brussels in 1903 and ends in 1923. In the manner of Tolstoy (on
whom Aldanov had published a critical work in 1915), itportrays
historical personages as well as private individuals. There are accurate, carefully researched portraits of Mussolini, Wilhelm II, Franz
Joseph, Witte, Lenin, Stalin. The most brilliant is perhaps of Witte.
The portrait of Lenin is superior to its only rival, Solzhenitsyn's in
Lenin in Zurich-in part because Aldanov unlike Solzhenitsyn
knew many men who had known Lenin. Here is one of many characterizations of Lenin:
His favourites of not long before, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were
holding things up. They did not want an uprising. Lenin began
to hate them ferociously. Not, to be sure, for long. In complete
contrast to Stalin he was never rancorous, and was always ready
to come to a friendly accord with any of the people whom he
referred to and considered "scoundrels" and "sons-of-bitches,"
as long as they submitted to him completely. Robespierre could
not talk for two minutes without saying something about ''vertu."
Lenin would never even have pronounced the word, not only
because the world had undergone a c lumge in literary sty I.e. He
simply did not understand just that "virtue" was, and what its
point was if it existed. Surely, it was impossible to make a revolution without scoundrels?
A meditation, born of decades of recollection, study and reflection, on the Europe that was to destroy itself in the First World
War, The Suicides contains many stunning historical judgements-iudgements of simplicity and depth rarely found in academic historians. Aldanov understood the interrelation of events
throughout Europe because he had an uncanny sense-that betrayed itself in the resiliency of his narrative-of the relation of
public events to private lives, especially to private bafflement, incapacity and self-ignorance.
65
�Here is one of many remarks on the outbreak of the First World
War:
According to all profound sociological :theories the assassination
of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was only the occasion of the
World War. The real causes were quite different: "Anglo-German economic rivalry," "struggle for markets," "internal contradictions of the capitalist order," etc. But the reading of the
simple-minded correspondence of the contemporary statesmen
thrusts another conclusion forward: The assassination in Sarajevo was not an occasion, it was just this that launched the catastrophe. They never wrote or spoke about "the struggle for
markets" or about "the internal contradictions of the capitalist
order" and they had never heard about them. It may well be they
were not even acquainted with the words.
The following section tells the story of perhaps the most famous
Bolshevik holdup. It also represents a turning point in the life of
one of the main characters in the novel, Jambul, who after the robbery leaves the terrorists forever to return to the land and the religion of his fathers in Turkey.
Dzhugashvili is the name Stalin bore at his birth, Koba his nickname. Krupskaya was Lenin's wife. L. R
The Tillis terrorists usually assembled in the same restaurant, the Tilipuchuri. This had nothing to do with conspiracy; they knew that the local police were very inefficient, and would not be too zealous in arresting them. At
that time a policeman's trade, especially in the Caucasus,
was just as daD.gerous as a terrorist's.
The Caucasian Deputy Police Commissioner, Count
Vorontsov-Dashkov, was a man of liberal views. He was
fond of the Caucasians, as all Russians have been, with a
slight touch of benevolent disdain for the Caucasian
accent. In his youth he himself had fought against the
mountaineers for three years, and recalled that there was
never the slightest hostility to them in the army at the time
and that in Russian literature, from Pushkin and Lermontov to Tolstoy, there was scarcely a single unsympathetic
Caucasian. The war had long since been over, but in a confused and almost unconscious way the Commissioner re-
garded the terrorists of the Twentieth Century as a somewhat inferior repetition of Shamil's mountaineers.*
He did not, of course, consort with the terrorists, but he
attempted to maintain human relations somehow with the
leaders of moderate Socialism. They sometimes made private pacts which, however, instantly became public. For
instance, when the Armenians and the Tatars fell out, he
handed the Social-Democratic Party five hundred rifles in
order to arm the working-class guards who were maintaining order, on the word of honor of the Menshevik,
Ramishvili, that the rifles would be returned to the author-
*For Shamil's mountaineers see Leo Tolstoy's short story, A Prisoner in
the Caucasus (1872). L.R.
66
ities as soon as the emergency was over. Before the expected arrival of the Tsar in the Caucasus, he secured the
revolutionaries' word of honor that no attempts at assassination would be made. He did not think such an agreement completely assured the Tsar's safety, but in the
Caucasus, in his opinion, it was a better guarantee than
any police measures. Vorontzov-Dashkov was opposed to
execution; he thought that no matter what you did you
couldn't frighten a Chechen or Ingush with the gallows. In
addition he had almost become a fatalist after the assassination of Alexander II-you can't escape fate.
He had been a favorite of three Tsars. Hence the Government disliked him intensely. The Count's ancient
name, however, his enormous wealth, his independence as
a man who needed no one, even his seignorial appearance
and his manner of talking to everyone in the same way,
and most of all his personal intimacy with the Tsar made
the Government wary. It interfered as little as possible
with his administrative methods in the Caucasus. The
Commissioner's views may have been reflected a little
even in the activities of the police. But even out of simple
caution police agents tried to avoid looking into places like
the Tilipuchuri restaurant unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Everyone in the Caucasus carried cold steel, a
great many were revolutionists, and there were more than
a few primitive bombs being made. "Absolutely every
child is capable of taking a sardine-tin and some drugstore
articles and making a shell that's fit to blow up his nursemaid-," wrote a contemporary.
It is likely that even at that time the Police Department
knew that the "expropriations" were being conducted
from afar by Lenin himself. It may also have known that
for this purpose the Central Committee of the Party had
formed a small, still more central committee, which was so
secret that for a long time the most eminent Social-Democrats never even knew of its existence.
There were only two men on this committee besides
Lenin: Krasin, alias Nikitich, alias Winter, alias-for some
reason-the Horse, and Bogdanov, who had half a dozen
pseudonyms: Maximov, Verner, Rakhmetov, Sysoika,
Reinert, Ryadovey. The members of the Police Department were not particularly interested in the spiritual qualities of the revolutionaries: "They're all swine!" (Some
might have added "including ourselves"). But it was just
these two Bolsheviks whom it was difficult to suspect of
terrorism: one was busy either with philosophy, science, or
heaven knows what; the other was a prominent engineer
who had amassed some money in business and was by no
means a "horse" but an extremely able and skilful activist.
But the people they had assigned as deputies in immediate
charge of terroristic activities in the Caucasus were known
to the police-Koba or Dzhugashvili, and Kamo.
There were fables and anecdotes about Kamo in the
Caucasus. But not even the revolutionists knew much
about Dzhugashvili. They spoke about him even less. Incomprehensibly this man, who was passionately in love
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�with self-advertisement, which he later devoted himself to
with a success unheard of in history, in his youth told almost nothing about himself even to his close comrades:
doubtless he suspected them all of being provocateurs. For
still far more incomprehensible reasons he almost never
spoke about his doings in the Caucasus even later on,
when he could have without the slightest danger.
It was already dusk when )ambul hurried to the restaurant. He glanced into the open window. No guards were
there. Where can they be today? he wondered. He knew
that no one should stay home alone that night-unless
Koba, perhaps-he has no nerves at all, thought )ambul.
He walked on further. After convincing himself that
there were no suspicious-looking people about, he turned
back. Time to eat, he thought, I haven't had a thing since
morning.
Early that morning, after taking the best horse out of the
stable, he had ridden far out of the city and had practiced
with his revolver in a secluded spot in the woods. Even
years earlier he had been able to hit a hull's eye at fifteen
paces. He had stuck a sheet of paper about three times as
large as a playing card on to a tree and missed it twice in a
row. This annoyed him very much, though not much accuracy was needed for the business on the following day.
Lack of sleep, of course! he thought angrily. But what
about it, I don't think it's the first time I've gone into a
dangerous business. Before I used to sleep perfectly well.
He took himself in hand and began shooting better. Before
his last shot he made a bet with himself; if I miss it means
we'll have a fiasco. He had made bets with himself at home
too, with both cards and coins: he got different results, but
even without the cards one thing was clear: whatever happened it was already impossible to withdraw. It would have
meant dishonoring oneself.
Sometimes it seemed to him that he should actually
make bets about something else too: was the whole thing
necessary? He had had doubts for a long time, and they had
recently been growing stronger and stronger. Occasionally
he even asked himself whether they weren't to be explained by his fear of death. His friends said he was absolutely fearless-he simply didn't understand what fear
was. Such remarks got back to him and pleased him. Nevertheless, he thought them exaggerated: people who had
never been afraid didn't exist. Sokolov and Kamo are
braver than anyone I've ever seen, but they must have
been afraid, too.
At last he hit the sheet of paper, actually right in the
center, and he stopped practicing. He had taken along only
one reserve box of bullets, and it was bad luck to take thirteen shots before an action. Seven hits out of twelve, he
thought, not bad, but before I would have done better.
Before, whenever he came to the Caucasus, even from
Paris, he always became lively and merry. Now it was difTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ferent. His usual gaiety had almost left him. He was serious-minded, somewhat solemn. Yes, it's quite possible I'll
be killed. Well, so I'll be killed, there'll just be one )ambul
less, that's all ... I thought the time had gone by when I
would draw up a balance-sheet of my life before a dangerous action; it seems it hasn't quite, he said to himself. He
thought about his aging father: how would this make him
feel?
He thought about Lyuda too, sometimes. He had pleasant memories of her. He didn't know just what she was
doing. At their parting in Petersburg she hadn't asked him
to write (she had simply forgotten). This hurt him. Nevertheless, he sent her a letter from Tiflis. To avoid causing
her any trouble he sent it without a signature, in an assumed handwriting, and without any indication of a return address. There could be no reply. But she probably
wouldn't have answered anyhow, out of pride, he thought.
He didn't write again. It must have been for the first time
since he was fourteen years old that a woman was on his
mind. In general he thought about women very seldom.
The restaurant was empty and stifling, with a smell of
fried onions and freshly ground coffee, each a smell he
liked. Kamo sat at the end of the room. He had evidently
just arrived. There was nothing to eat or drink on the little
table in front of him. He's got himself all dressed up, the
jackass! thought )ambul. The cutthroat was wearing a
dark-red Circassian tunic, a white silk Caucasian coat, and
Moroccan soft-soled boots; the scabbards of the sabre and
the dagger were thickly adorned with turquoise, silver, and
ivory. A white Caucasian fur-cap was laying on the chair.
Thank God he hasn't put on a felt cloak and hood, in June!
)ambul thought. Can he have the bombs on him, too? No,
for the time being Koba's taken the bombs away from
them. Koba may be anything you like, he's not a fool!
After glancing around once more quickly, almost imperceptibly, he greeted Kamo, and sat down opposite him at
the little table.
"Look here, don't sit that way with your back to the wall.
How will you fight if the cops jump in?" asked Kamo. His
Russian sounded almost like a caricature of the Caucasian
accent used for jokes. There was no other language they
had in common. Both spoke Tatar badly.
"Why should we sit side by side at such a small table? If
the cops come in please inform me."
"When should I inform you? A cop runs quickly. Lose
half a second, you're through. Impossible to lose half a second," said Kama, who never understood jokes.
"All right then, I'll know soon enough. There's a backentrance behind you. A cop likes to run through backentrances, too. Hadn't you guessed?"
HNo/' admitted Kama, astonished.
Jambullooked at him, as always, with tender curiosity. It
was only with him that he spoke jocularly now. He knew of
his exploits, which usually succeeded, and he couldn't understand why or how they had succeeded. He doesn't even
understand what a conspiracy is! Jambul thought. He obvi-
67
�ously only has instincts instead of a mind, like a wolf or
1
tiger.
Jambul knew a great many terrorists. He considered So·
kolov the most remarkable of them', and was a little sorry
the executed man hadn't been a Caucasian. The affair in
Tiflis was going to be the work of Caucasians only. All of
them reckless and foolhardy. All of them much cleverer
than Kamo, thought Jambul. Nevertheless he's going to
have the chief role, maybe that's right after all.
"Have you had any vodka?"
uNo."
"Will you have some with me? It may be the last one
we'll have."
"Are both of them watching out for the cashier?"
"Both of them are watching out for the cashier."
"Who's going to be carrying the money?"
"Two will carry money. The cashier and the accountant."
"Are they young? Family men?"
"I don't know."
~~what
are their names?"
"The cashier is Kurdyumov. The accountant is Golov·
nya."
11
ls there lots of money?"
"Annette Sulakhvelidze says-a million. Patsiya
Galdava says three hundred thousand."
"Old wives' tales! Are they going in a carriage?"
"Maybe," said Kamo indifferently. "I'll drink one glass,
no more, before tomorrow morning. I'll drink milk. I won't
drink wine."
"Why not? Did Koba give you orders? Lenin himself
drinks a little. They say he likes Italian wines."
"He doesn't. I brought wine once to Kuokal. A whole
wineskin from the Caucasus I brought. At that time I was
an aide·de.camp. I rode in first class. He thanked me.
Lenin doesn't like wine. But Bogdanov likes wine. He was
so happy! And Lenin gave me bombs, Krasin made them. I
also made them. He knows chemistry. I helped. Good
"They are going in a phaeton."
"What's the guard?"
"Another phaeton."
"But it's not the phaeton itself that's going to do the
guarding. Who's going to be in it?"
"Five men with guns. Caldava says-always five men
with guns."
Don't tell me there isn't going to be a Cossack convoy?"
"There will be a Cossack convoy. It will be behind. It
bombs."
"Many Cossacks. I don't know how many."
"Oh, we'll do away with quite a few people if we're not
finished off first. They have wives, children ... Does that
mean the women couldn't find out anything else?"
uStolypins?"
"Stolypins," Kamo nodded. This was the name for a
new type of bomb, which had been tried out first on Ap·
tekar Island.
"So . . . D'you want something to eat? D'you like
shashlyk?"
"I like shashlyk. I like almond pastry. Are you paying
with your own mon'ey? Not Party money-if it's Party
money I'll have cheese."
"My own, my own. I've never had any Party money and
never will. Tomorrow, too, if it comes off, I won't take any·
thing for myself."
"Will I? You are a fool!"
"But maybe others will, eh?"
"Listen, you want me to kill?"
"No. Of course our own people won't. I know, they're
almost all good fellows, but the others have stolen. What
will you eat with the vodka? I'll pay, I get some from my
father, today there's no sense worrying about money.
What zakuski d'you like?"
"I like everything. Just a little bit. Some cheese ... "
Jambul called over the owner and after some reflection
ordered a lavish dinner (perhaps the last we'll ever have,
he thought); smoked sturgeon, caviar, cheese, shashlyk,
almond pastry, a carafe of vodka, a bottle of the best
Kakhetin wine.
"Now tell me, just don't shout," he said in a low voice,
after the owner had gone away. "Have you seen Patsiya?"
Tve seen Patsiya/' answered Kama, who whenever it
was possible preferred to give answers in the wording of
the question. "I've seen Annette, too."
1
68
11
will be in front, too."
"Many Cossacks?,
"The women couldn't, and you and I couldn't."
"Are there any changes in the plans?"
"Why changes? It's a good plan."
"What does your Koba think?"
"Koba gives the orders, and what he thinks, who
knows?"
11
That's so. He's always lying."
uDon't dare say Koba lies!"
"But in his whole life he never said a word of truth: he's
simply incapable of it."
"Listen. D'you want me to kill you!" said Kamo, and his
face began to flush scarlet. "Lenin-here!" And he raised
his hand high above his head. "Then comes Nikitich." He
lowered his hand. "Then Koba." His hand went down an·
other little bit. "And then you, me, everyone." He placed
his hand on the table.
"Thank you. But your Koba, after all, used to be a Men·
shevik, though he hides it carefully."
"No more Bolshevik, Menshevik. In Stockholm Lenin
got united."
uHe 1ll soon be disunited. 11
"He will not be disunited. But Koba was never a Men·
shevik. Always Bolshevik."
"He was a Menshevik, he was. In the Caucasus we all
were," protested Jambul, who liked to tease him.
"You lie! I kill!".
"No, please, don't kill me. Kill someone else instead. By
the way, do you always carry your Mauser on you?"
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�"Always. Never without."
"Well, another fool," said Jambul, though he was never
separated from his revolver either. "What else did you talk
about with Lenin?"
"Provocateurs we talked about. Lenin thinks provoca·
teurs. Krasin also thinks so. I suggested a plan. I go to all
the comrades. I take three men, good ones, I take along a
stake. A big one. I ask: 'Are you a provocateur?' If he's a
provocateur, we stick him on stake right away. If he gets
scared, it means he's also a provocateur. A good Bolshevik
never gets scared. Lenin didn't want it. Krasin didn't either. He cursed. Cursed a lot. He said, 'You are a savage
and an idiot.' Lenin laughed. It means it's true. I know I
have no culture . . . Do I talk Russian well?"
l'Magnificently.''
"I don't know grammar. I don't know anything. I can't
write. In Georgian and Armenian I can. Badly. I can't do
arithmetic at all," said Kamo with a sigh. "No culture. A
savage. My grandfather was a scholar. A priest."
"Really? A priest?"
"A good man, a scholar. I myself was a believer, oh, what
a believer I was! I prayed a lot. Then I stopped, the comrades taught me. Koba taught me. He taught me every·
thing. Grateful. But I learned badly. My father was a
drunkard. He's alive, but he kicked me out a long time
ago. Because of him I have no culture ... Well, let's talk
business."
"Well, tell me everything."
They went over what was to be done the next day.
There really were no changes in the plan.
" ... We start off at Sumbatov's house."
"But who is finally going to throw the first bomb from the
roof? That's the only thing that still hasn't been decided."
"None of your business, who throws it. Koba knows who
throws it. Not you."
"He'll tell me today, no later. It's just as much 'my business' as his," said Jambul angrily. HI'm risking more than
he is."
"Not more than he. You're not necessary, either. Koba
is necessary."
"I have a different opinion ... But tell me, is it true they
once hanged you?"
"They hanged me. The swine hanged everyone they
caught right off. I stuck my chin into the rope. They didn't
notice. They were drunk. It was disgusting. The swine
went away. I untied myself. Ran away. They didn't hang
me. My chin was sore a month."
"Have you got a pure-blooded horse ready for tomor·
row?"
"Don't say pure-blooded. Say thoroughbred. A Russian
officer told me that. A dragoon. Stationed here. You say
pure-blooded, they see immediately you're not a Russian
officer," explained Kamo with satisfaction.
"So they'll see it immediately, will they? And of course
you're a typical Moscow hussar ... Well anyhow, try not to
get in the way of the bomb on your thoroughbred. It would
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
be a pity about the horse. Does it mean you're going to be
in uniform tomorrow, too?"
"In uniform."
"More fool you. I'm afraid you're going to mess things
up. It would be better if you gave me your part."
1 won't give it to you. You're the fool now."
"And where did you get that medal you've stuck on?
Did you buy it in the Armenian Bazaar?"
"I bought it in the Armenian Bazaar."
"You should have bought a St. Andrew First Class," ad.
vised Jambul, but caught himself up, thinking, he'll do it
too!
"Not St. Andrew First Class. Koba said: 'Stanislas Third
Class with crossed swords and a ribbon!' If anyone was in
two battles in the Japanese war then it's a Stanislas Third
Class with crossed swords and a ribbon. You don't know.
Koba knows."
"Koba knows everything. And what is he going to do to.
morrow himself? Is he also going to shoot from the
Square?"
"He's not going to shoot from the Square. If he's killed,
who'll be left?"
"Of course, of course. Is he excited?"
"He's not excited."
"Is it true he's as evil as the devil?"
"Evil," agreed Kamo, after thinking. "But not like the
devil. His wife died."
"I know. Is it true that she was a believer and couldn't
endure Socialists? Did he love her?"
41
"He loved her so much, so much."
"And I never believed he could love anyone. Iremashvili
told me he was at the cemetery. He himself and Soso-he
calls Koba 'Soso' for old times' sake. They were friends.
Anyhow Dzhugashvili told him, putting his hand over his
heart: 'Only she could soften my heart of stone. Now, I
hate everyone! It's so empty, so unspeakably empty!' I
questioned him over and over. He swore it was exactly that
way! So Koba can't shoot from the Square? Are you worried about him."
"I'm not worried about you. I'm not worried about my·
self. I'm worried about Koba."
"Right," said Jambul. It's really impossible even to get
angry with him, he thought, looking squarely at Kamo. Ka·
rna's eyes were in some incomprehensible way kind, soft,
sad. "Well, fine, but when you grab the sack in the Square
whom will you give it to?"
"I'll give it to Koba. I'll give it to Lenin. I'll give it to
Krasin."
"They're all right. It's true that Dzhugashvili doesn't
care about money. But where can it be held for the time
being? It's not so easy after all to get it across the border."
"None of your business."
"Koba had a good idea. He told me about it. He wants to
hide it in the Tiflis Observatory. He worked there once, I
think, didn't he? He knows every nook and cranny there.
He wants to put it in the Director's sofa. Clever! Clever!"
69
�~~Ask Koba."
"It's clever," repeated Jambul. He' liked the idea primarily because of its originality: the Obs\'rvatory! He thought
with a smile that Koba wouldn't entrust the money to one
man alone. Either he'd take it himself or send a few people, so that it'll be more difficult to steal it. "I would still
like to see him before the action. Will you come with me?"
"I won't come. And I won't give you the address."
"I know the address without you anyhow," said Jambul.
He said good-bye to Kama and went out of the restaurant, once again looking around in all directions. He did
not feel like going home. It was really too late to see Koba,
and actually there was no point to it. He wouldn't have to
spend the night at home, he thought. For that matter,
fate's fate. Anyhow, I won't surrender alive. . . What's
Lenin going to spend the money on? The little periodicals?lf so what a fine thing to go into an action like this for!
Tomorrow I may very well be dead-would it be worth it?
Suddenly he recalled the explosion on Aptekar Island.
He had read the newspaper accounts with even more eagerness than Lyuda, or anyone else; from the very first moment he understood whose handiwork it had been, and
knew all the participants. Now, and not for the first time,
he imagined these unknown, speechless young people, almost just as devoted to Cain as the Klimova girl, going in a
landau to Aptekarsky Street from the Morskaya, how methodically they noted the turns-two more? no, threehow they studied the names of the streets, the house numbers, how they counted the minutes of life left to them.
How for the last time, in front of the villa, they looked at
the earth, the sky, the people, the cab-driver, who had also
been condemned to death by them.
No, I couldn't have done that! thought Jambul with a
shudder. There's a great difference between a death that's
possible and one that's certain, without the slightest, the
most infinitesimal hope of rescue! He thought about the
arrest and execution of Cain. How could he have failed to
commit suicide at the last moment? He couldn't do it in
time, that Hercules! And what if I don't either? ... Nevertheless there's some hope, and there's some sense in this,
too. We'll lay our hands on a million, there'll be an uprising
and the Caucasus will free itself. That's the one thing that
distinguishes our operation from an ordinary armed hold-up,
but that one thing is enough ... Yet, if I'm killed life will
go on exactly as it always has, it's just that I won't know
anything about it. And people won't remember, I'll never
go down in history. Will anyone ever recall anything about
Sokolov? Who, with all his recklessness and heartlessness,
was a super-hero, a match for all the Lenins and
Plekhanovs?
At this late hour Erivan Square was deserted. He looked
at the house from the roof of which some man he didn't
know was supposed to throw the first bomb the next day.
Three princesses, well-known in Tiflis society, lived on the
top floor; good-natured anecdotes used to circulate about
them. Could he be up there already? That would be more
70
reasonable than lifting himself up there in the morning
light. He guessed that the man would mount from the
courtyard by the staircase or the pipes.
He walked up to the gates and tried them. They were
unlocked. Jambullooked around and peered into the feebly lit courtyard. Two men were standing with their backs
to him looking at the roof. One was in a Russian shirt and
sandals. He looked to Jambullike Koba. Really, how can I
possibly work together with such a man! he thought. It was
as though the sight of Koba brought to a head in a flash all
those doubts that had been brewing in him for days and
months.
Tiflis was under martial law. Cossacks rode constantly
about the streets of the city. The policemen stationed at
the Police Commissioner's palace were armed with rifles.
Patrols were stationed at every intersection. Dozens of
people were participating in the preparation and execution of the expropriation. As usually happens in such circumstances, confused rumors about the forthcoming action had reached the authorities. Later the Tiflis prosecutor was to accuse the police chief of lightmindedness. The
police chief, to justify himself, would make some unflattering references to the ideas of the prosecutor.
The "theoreticians" of the expropriations preferred to
call them "engagements in the civil war." They were fond
of military vocabulary. Some of them may have recalled,
from War and Peace, or from the countless newspaper quotations such as "Die erste Kolonne marschiert," the "dispositions" taken by Weihrother before Austerlitz. But it is
possible that in spite of Tolstoy they thought that battles
actually did take place as a result of just such "dispositions." In any case they had carefully worked out a detailed plan of action at Erivan Square: Chiabrishvili, Ekbakidze, Shishmanov, Kalaniadze, Chichiashvili and Ebralidze were going to attack the phaetons carrying the
money that was surrounded by the convoy, Dalakishvili
and Kakriashvili the police detachment near the Town
Council, Lominadze and Lemidze the patrol at the Velyaminovskaya, and so on.
But expropriations are really not like battles. They do
not last for a whole day, or even for several hours, but
barely three or four minutes, and in any case there is certainly no science about them in existence. The Correla~
tion of forces" could not be known to the expropriators,
since at any given moment a patrol of five or ten or even
twenty Cossacks might turn up on the Square. Erivan
Square itself was actually the least appropriate place in
Tiflis for an expropriation. It was crowded, central, and
close to the Police Commissioner's palace. Cossack pa·
trois, heavily reinforced, kept riding across it during those
days almost uninterruptedly. Army and police posts were
permanently stationed near the district headquarters, the
44
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�banks, and at the corners of every one. of the streets giving
into the Square.
The leaders of the enterprise, whose regard for the lives
of others, or for that matter their own, :was not excessive,
had decided to take measures this time to cut down the
number of victims: from early morning on Kama, in an
army uniform, and with a wild look, had been walking
around the Square and in a low voice, interlarding his pe·
culiar Russian with "adroit mysterious remarks," had advised passers-by to get out as fast as possible. This device
was rather senseless: one passer-by was constantly being
replaced by another. In the nature of things, this strange
officer ought to have instantly aroused the strongest suspicions of even the stupidest policeman. He aroused no suspicions at all. He left safely before the start of the action
and took his place in a drozhky harnessed to the thoroughbred. He himself drove standing up (also hardly ever done
by officers).
Some post office official had informed the terrorists
that on june 13th, at 10 o'clock, the cashier of the Tiflis
branch of the State Bank, Kurdyumov, and the accountant, Golovnya, would be receiving a large sum of money
at the Postal Telegraph Office and would then take it to
the bank, in Baronsky Street, past Pushkin Square, across
Erivan Square and on along Sololaksky Street. The official
could hardly have been bribed or frightened by the terrorists, who didn't do things that way. They never promised
anyone money, and unlike many other expropriators did
not even take any money for themselves. They gave everything to the Party. Probably the official also sympathized
with the Party, or else hated the Government like much of
the population of Russia.
Kurdyumov and Golovnya went to the post office on
foot. This was a routine affair for them: money from the
capital arrived in Tiflis often. It would have been impossible to reproach the heads of the bank with lightmindedness: the cashier and accountant had been assigned a
guard, Zhilyaev, and a fairly large detachment of soldiers
and Cossacks.
Probably for reasons of economy, the phaetons were
hired only at the post office. Kurdyumov and Golovnya received the money without counting it. That would have
been dangerous, and for that matter needless: it was sealed
in two huge packages, of 170 thousand and 80 thousand.
In addition the cashier was given another 465 rubles that
weren't sealed. Kurdyumov counted these and put them
in a side-pocket of his jacket. He hid the packages in a sack,
drew a leather band tightly around the neck and carefully
carried it out to the phaetons, accompanied by the accountant, the guard, and some soldiers. The Cossacks
were waiting in the street. Kurdyumov and Golovnya got
into the first phaeton, putting the sack on the rug at their
feet. Zhilyaev and two soldiers were in the second phaeton.
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
There were another five soldiers in the third. The Cossacks
divided up; some of them galloped on ahead of the phaetons,
some of them behind; there was one Cossack alongside the
first phaeton, near one of the little doors.
Probably one of the expropriators had been keeping the
cashier under observation at the post office, too. In any
case observers were waiting for them in various places
along the road. At Pushkin Place Patsiya Galdava signaled
Stepka lntsirkveli the approach of the Cossacks; he passed
it on to Annette Sulakhvelidze, who was promenading about
in front of the staff building; she made a sign to Bachua
Kuprashvili, who was running along the square with an unfolded newspaper (which was the last general signal). In a
moment he joined the expropriators who were running towards the phaetons.
The first bomb was thrown from the roof of the house at
the corner of the Square and Sololaksky Street. It was followed by others thrown from various angles, and then instantly by a desperate burst of revolver shot. Chaos supervened. There was no question of "disposition." Because of
the smoke almost nothing was visible. People scattered to
all sides as best they could.
Kama's drozhky whirled into the Square from Ganovsky
Street. The reins in his left hand he stood on the footboard
shooting his revolver off in all directions and yelling out
fearful curses. According to the "dispositions" he was supposed to seize the sack with the money in the first phaeton. But it wasn't easy even to find the phaeton that
strangely enough had remained undamaged. The cashier
and accountant had been thrown into the street by the
force of the explosion, and a Cossack killed.
Kama had almost never lost control of himself in his life
and was actually incapable of losing his head whenever he
was carrying out some definite order. He had never felt the
slightest doubts either before the explosion or after it:
Lenin ordered, Nikitich assisted, Koba organized-so
what was there to brood about? Thinking wasn't his business. Now in the Square he acted almost exclusively by
instinct. He may have been the only one who was completely calm, in spite of the din of the bombs, the shooting,
and the savage outcries. He was yelling and cursing desperately not because of anger or excitement, but simply because yelling and cursing were part of the technique of
such actions, as in the old days the cavalry sprang to the
attack with howls and roars.
Bachua Kuprashvili jumped out of a cloud of smoke at
the right and ran off down Sololaksky Street. For a second
a phaeton appeared to be outlined in the cloud, but just
then another bomb crashed and smoke swallowed up the
phaeton again. Bachua's fallen! thought Kama. He's killed!
But the sack, where's the sack! And in that same second
he saw Chiabrashvili, holding the sack in his hand, running towards Velyaminovsky Street, where there was less
smoke, with extraordinary, unnatural, super~human
speed. This was definitely an out-and-out disregard of orders. Kama swiftly wheeled his drozhky around and hur-
71
�tied after him. The thought flashed through his mind that
Bachua might have only been wounded, but it was impossible to return in the drozhky-let the others get him!
It took him a moment to snatch the sack from Chiabrashvili and to rush off again to the conspirators' apartment. A number of the other expropriators were already
there. He took them in with a glance, flung the sack on the
floor and shouted violently:
'Where's Bachua?"
uKilled! ... " "He'll be here soon! ... " "Wounded! ... "
44
0on't know! ... "answered voices panting. The disposi~
tions" hadn't reviewed the question: which was more im·
11
portant-the sack or a comrade? But it was clear enough
that the sack was far more important. But Kama's face
flushed scarlet; he heaped frenzied curses on his comrades. Suddenly the door opened and Bachua, a bloodstained hand to his head, appeared on the threshold.
Kamo, against all rules of conspiracy, yelled something in a
wild voice and flung himself suddenly into a dance. Bachua, barely able to control his panting, explained that he
had lost consciousness on the street only for half a minute,
then jumped up and run on there. No one listened much.
They all talked at once of what they had just done and
lived through. At the top of their lungs they shouted that
they had to speak in low voices: people on the street might
overhear them. Kamo yelled out something, and went on
dancing. Someone picked up the sack, put it on the table
and started loosening the collar. In a flash Kamo bounded
over to the table like a cat. He trusted comrades, and knew
there was not a single thief among them, but Koba had
ordered the packages to be brought sealed: Dzhugashvili
trusted the comrades less.
However, the figures were written on the covers:
"170,000" and "80,000." Not letting the packages out of
his hands, Kamo read them off. He tried to add them in his
head, others helping him: "250,000." The enthusiasm was
general, though a few of them had expected it to be a million. Kamo started dancing about again, holding a package
in each hand over his head. ~'It's done!" "The revolu·
tion! ... " "Now we'll be free! ... " they said. One of the
expropriators said everything had gone offlike clockwork.
That was how they all spoke in Tiflis that day, some with
delight, others with rage. A day later every newspaper in
Russia wrote the same.
Jambul couldn't remember all the details of the action in
Erivan Square, the most terrifying of his life. These lapses
in memory happened to him occasionally when he had
drunk two or three bottles of wine after dinner. In practical matters they had never happened to him before.
The plan had been for him to shoot a policeman standing at the door of the Commercial Bank; he had chosen
this himself; he didn't want to shoot the cashier or the accountant, though he didn't tell his comrades. And just as
soon as he saw Kuprashvili running along with the opened
newspaper he took his revolver out of his pocket and went
over without haste to the bank. The policeman, a beard-
72
Jess young blond, obviously a Russian from the north, was
standing half-turned toward him, gazing curiously at the
approaching convoy. Jambul remembered shooting immediately after the first bomb exploded, even before smoke
hid the carriage-and he didn't understand what had happened. He was incapable, simply incapable, of not hitting a
man six or seven paces from him. He recalled aiming at his
head: a Mauser bullet was supposed to kill outright. The
policeman, completely unharmed, shouted desperately,
turned around and snatched at his own revolver. It was
just at this second that the chaos in the square began. And
without being able to remember how, Jambul found himself some thirty paces from the bank doors, behind the
newspaper kiosk.
He recalled shooting twice more into the pall around the
phaeton, also probably without killing anyone. He remembered later that he didn't want to be killed either. He remembered that for a few seconds he stared brainlessly at
the newspapers hanging on the wall: the Voice of the Caucasus, the Tiflis Gazette . .. Suddenly he saw a Cossack on
a big bay galloping at him whirling his lash. In a flash Jam·
bul's self-possession came back to him. He bounded a few
paces forward and fired. The horse reared up, hit by a bullet in its throat. He stopped. Just then a second bomb burst
and deafened him. Someone ran past him, clutching his
side and yelling something, with a contorted face. The
Cossack wasn't getting up. The phaeton is supposed to go
back along the Sololaksky, Jambul remembered, and ran
off that way. No, the phaeton's smashed now, of course.
What should I do now? For a moment he stood there motionless, still half stunned. Then he rushed off, over to the
kiosk. The Cossack was gone. The big bay horse, expiring,
was writhing convulsively on its side in a pool of blood. His
whole life he would remember its brown eyes with their
distended whites. Then there was a gap in his memory. He
tried and failed to recall how much longer he stayed in the
Square and just what he was doing there.
He came to himself in a broad side-street. People were
running in the street screaming in fear and shoving each
other. He didn't think it proper to run, and walked along
on the pavement at an ordinary, scarcely hurried pace. He
thought he would have to turn off to the right further on,
and that the conspiratorial apartment was very close. I
didn't want to kill it. Why did it have to rear up? I killed it
for the sake of Lenin's little periodicals ... Dozens of people must have been killed ... But not by me ... How could
I have missed that policeman? Suddenly everyone leapt
off the street on to the sidewalks and into the entry-ways: a
squadron of dragoons was hurtling towards them on their
way to the Square. Oh, what horses! thought Jambul ...
Why did it have to rear up? ...
No more shots could be heard, but from the direction of
the square a confused roaring could be heard. The street
was almost empty. Jambul turned off to the right and came
to the conspiratorial apartment. Though the windows
were closed he could hear shouts, clamor, laughter. What's
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the matter with them, he thought, have they gone out of
their senses? At some other time he might have liked the
Caucasian boldness and contempt for danger, but now he
listened for a moment and passed on. ·
A little further on he came across a wretched-looking bistro. In the doorway the proprietor, pale and excited, was
evidently about to shut down. He glanced suspiciously at
Jambul, and almost refused to let him in, but he did. He
said something quickly and evasively. Fifty? thought Jambul: impossible! There couldn't have been fifty casualties!
Unwilling to talk, Jambul asked for more vodka, and
tossed off a few glasses one after another at the counter. In
a languid way he thought this might arouse suspicion: in
the morning no one gulps down vodka that way ...
"Is there any cognac?" he asked, and on being told there
was only Russian Shustovsky, but that it was good, he ordered some, not in a mug but in a tea-glass. He tossed it off
at one gulp. The owner looked at him in alarm. Jambul
paid and, shaking even more than before, went out. Yes,
yes ... Not very pretty ... Not a cavalry charge in goldembroidered uniforms. . . All for Lenin's little periodicals ... Not pure blood, but mixed with dirt. .. Much
more than in war. .. Perhaps all oflife is a mistake ... Perhaps, yes, it may very well be ... he muttered to himself in
the street.
For the first few days after the expropriation Jambul
didn't see any of the terrorists. He read the newspapers
and drank a great deal, though he had already calmed
down. He had noticed no traces he had left behind and
thought with even more conviction than before that the
Russian police were very bad and in addition were frightened to death, especially in the Caucasus.
Money and another letter arrived from his father in Turkey, at his temporary agreed-on address. The old man
asked his son more insistently than usual to come home;
he also complained about his health more than usual, said
that he wanted to see him once more without fail, and
mentioned the necessity of putting his inheritance in order. Jambul had received such invitations before, too, and
had always declined them. He likes to complain, like all old
people, he thought. Perhaps he's heard something, and is
worried. They seldom corresponded. The old man could
hardly have known with certainty just what his son was
doing. Jambul had said vaguely that he was taking part in
the struggle for Caucasian independence. His father was
able to understand this and even ought to sympathize.
He dined in the restaurants in the center of the city, and
each time made a point of going to Erivan Square. He
could not get the blood-bespattered bay horse, and its eyes
with their distended whites, out of his head. After going
home he read on into the late night. He had gone out to
the Golovin Prospekt and bought some books at random: a
thick Petersburg review, Shakespeare in Russian, To!THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
stoy' s Resurrection. He felt he absolutely had to leave for a
visit to his father. It was possible to leave legally, his passport was perfectly trustworthy. He loved his father but had
always told himself that he was incapable of watching anyone "grow old." But nevertheless he never used to write
about himself so alarmingly. Surely he's not going to die!
I'll be left alone in the world like a splinter ...
That evening he went to bed early and set out on the
wide bed the three books he had bought. At first he did not
read. He thought of his father. He thought of the action in
Erivan Square. He thought of Lenin. He's going to be
overjoyed, manna from heaven ... he said to himself, and
frowned still more severely: the words 'from heaven'
seemed far from apt. He couldn't fall asleep, in spite of the
huge amount of wine he had drunk. He never took sleeping pills, for some reason he was afraid of them. He
opened Shakespeare's plays at random, at the boring play
Cymbeline. He picked up the review. He noticed with irritation that the news-vendor had slipped him an old shopworn issue.
In the news-column he learned that 73 3 people had
been killed that year in Russia, 215 hanged, 341 shot by
order of a court martial, and in only a month and a half 221
had been executed by the new emergency court martial.
Perhaps there'll soon be not 215, but 216 hanged, he
thought, and again said to himself: one Jambul more or
less, isn't it all the same? He often spoke to himself that
way, but knew he was speaking insincerely: this particular
''one" had a certain importance for him. In the news story
some more figures were given of those called "representa·
lives of the authorities" who had been killed-the number
was just as large. Three days ago I didn't make a single addition to this statistic, thank God!
He also read in the review something long and boring
about a "Party of Democratic Reforms," about a Professor
Maxim Kovalevsky, and about a lawyer called Spasovich
who had recently died. "Public morals are becoming more
and more savage," Vladimir Danilovich had recently written from Warsaw: "Bomb explosionS1 shootings, looting,
and assassination take place every blessed day even in the
street." Words like this would once have evoked in Jambul
nothing but a sneer: he disliked liberals. They've had a
good time of it all their lives, he would have thought,
they've never once risked their precious existence. Now
he thought nothing of the kind. He put the paper aside
and opened Resurrection.
He read it until far into the night. He liked Tolstoy as an
artist, but had an even more scornful attitude towards his
ideas than he had towards those of the liberals: Just the
feeble-mindedness of old age, he thought. He found the
scene of the church service in the prison extremely annoying. No, really, it's just blasphemy after all. He didn't have
the right to make fun of other people's faith and he himself doesn't have any: a believer could never have written
that way about church ceremonies. But what oppressive,
terrifying language! he thought as he fell asleep.
73
�And at once the various figures which had been passing
through his mind during the past fe~ days and hours were
all jumbled together, spinning about and springing up into
the most senseless life. Lenin had written a little article on
blood-stained assignations. His father, with a sick, emaciated face, was lying in bed waiting for a doctor who never
came. A blood-bespattered bay horse galloped into his uncle's orchard, drenched in sunlight, and explained hoarsely
that it could no longer serve since it had been killed by a
bullet in the throat from )ambul. Dimitri Nekhlyudov explained to it that there must have been some juridical error: )ambul never killed horses and never would. In the
Tiflis Gazette Spasovich proposed to defend Kate Maslov
for a thousand rubles: "There are only ten Kates in all," he
said, "while a great deal more was taken from Kurdyumov." Lenin tore himself away from his little articles and
said mockingly that he wouldn't give a single ruble, not a
penny for any uprising, everything was needed for the little periodicals, and a fig to all the comrades ...
He was awakened by a knock at the door. It took him a
moment to come to himself. A young chambermaid came
into his room, smiled at him, and respectfully reported
that he was being asked for on the 'phone by His Most
Serene Highness Prince Dadiani. )ambul, tearing himself
away from the warm pillow, looked at her for a moment
agog. Then he remembered that this was the name Kama
wasliving under in Tiflis.
"Please te!Ihim I'll be right down," he said. The chambermaid smiled at him sweetly and went out. He put on a
splendid silken dressing gown he had bought in Paris at
the Place Vendome, and thought of Lyuda, who had been
particularly fond of it. Is it all right to go downstairs in a
dressing gown? He thought, it doesn't matter, it's early,
there'll be no one there. Actually, it was not even eight.
The fool might have rung later, he thought.
HGood morning, your Highness," he said. HWhat's hap~
pened? A very early call."
Kama replied that someone wanted to see him at ten
o'clock. Koba, of course, )ambul guessed.
"At his place," said Kama and hung up without waiting
for an answer, just as though there couldn't be the slightest doubt of )ambul's agreeing. )ambul shrugged his shoulders. I'll come late just for spite!
But it wasn't right to be late in their work, and he arrived
on the stroke of ten, leaving the carriage driver far from
the house Dzhugashvili was living in. The boss, quite
calm, met him with his usual sneer. How I hate the sight of
him! thought )ambul.
He had known this man for a long time. He could not
endure him. Whenever they met he would have an obscure feeling as though he were in the company of a real
evildoer. He never mentioned this about Koba to anyone
and even reproached himself for a baseless and consequently unfair judgment: he knew a good deal about
Dzhugashvili, but still not the sort of thing that would
have justified considering him a malefactor, or "the worst
74
of good-for-nothings." It sometimes seemed to him that
others who knew Koba well had the same feeling about
him and said nothing about it either: something in his very
looks made people wary. Well, in any case I'm not afraid of
him! thought )ambul. His irritation and spite were heightened immediately.
In the room there were Kama, in the same uniform with
the same dark-red embroidered decoration, and a woman
in a cheap, dirty white dress. )anbul remembered that her
name was Mara Bocharidze and that in the band she
worked at the role of a Tiflis house-wife. He greeted her
politely. Koba looked at him with a sneer and carelessly
extended his hand.
"Hello, bicho," he said. This word, which meant "old
boy" or something like it, and was a special little sneer of
Koba's, irritated )ambul still more: It meant, "You're all
just a lot of runts, and I'm a great big fellow." And all the
while, with all his wiliness and boldness, he was a very grey,
coarse fellow, rather shabby looking, with both an innate
and played-up coarseness. He thinks that has an effect on
everyone, thought )ambul: it doesn't on me, but he won't
be coarse with me, he knows it wouldn't be safe.
"Very glad to see you too, bicho," )ambul replied. Koba
turned away from him at once and started talking to
Kama, who was looking at him enraptured. Mara also
looked into his eyes, more in fear than in rapture. Koba
spoke Russian considerably better than Kama, considerably worse than )ambul.
<(That's a matter of course and you do it," he ordered.
)ambul's suggestion was confirmed: Dzhugashvili was assigning them both to take the money over to the Observatory: it was sewn into a large new mattress that was lying
on the floor in Koba's room.
"Yau go with Mara in one carriage, and he'll follow you
in another. Why did you have to be so stupid as to dress up
like an officer! Carrying a mattress! Change your clothes
immediately!"
Timidly deferential, Kama explained, partly in Russian,
partly in Georgian, that he hadn't known about the forthcoming transfer of the mattress. He also expressed the
opinion that it would be better to transfer it in the evening, after dusk.
''I'm not asking you for an opinion! Do as I say!" cried
Koba. Kama nodded instantly. Mara also nodded her head
in fright. Jambul interrupted: "Any street hawker could
move the mattress," he said mildly, as though addressing
no one in particular. "An outsider wouldn't be in any danger. In case of arrest he could explain that he had been
hired, and could prove his alibi. But if they catch Kama
they'll hang him. It's true that a street hawker might give
away the address of the apartment he'd gotten the mattress from," he added, as though naively. A gleam of spite
flashed through Koba's eyes. He stored up )ambul's words
in his memory, but he restrained himself and sketching
out on his face an extremely improbable looking goodnatured smile, said: "I shall ask you to follow them in anWINTER/SPRING 1983
�other carriage. Have you got a revolver on you?"
"I have, bicho. Very well, I'll follow them. Very closely,
of course, else they might be able to drag out the money
and scuttle off," said Jambul imperturbably.
Kamo' s face suddenly turned bestial. "Listen!" he
snarled.
Koba interrupted him instantly and started laughing,
just as good-naturedly. "He is, of course, joking. Now look,
these orders of mine are easy to understand. You and she
will take the mattress to the director. Then you'll go down
into the big hall. At eleven o'clock some astronomer is going to show the yokels all sorts of nonsense. Listen to it; go
together with the crowd, and also go out when the crowd
does. You won't be noticed. If on the way to the Observatory the police attack, start shooting, to the last cartridge,
naturally. And run to the apartment on Mikhailovsky
Street. With the mattress, naturally!" he said impressively.
"And on the way back, Maro, you little ninny, you come back
on foot alone. You have no revolver, you'll get off without
going to gaol. And you two can do as you please, shoot or
don't as you please. You, Kamo, no matter what happens,
you can't escape hanging. For old sins. But as for you," he
said, turning to Jambul, "there's no evidence of anything
against you. For carrying a revolver it'll be a lot if they send
you off to hard labor. Never mind, daddy will wait for you in
Turkey," said Koba, and a little sneer appeared on his face
once again. Jambul flared up. He knows about father too! he
thought: he keeps a check on the comrades!
"And how d'you know whom there's evidence against
and whom there's not?"
"A little magpie had it on its tail, as Lenin said in Tammerfors," said Dzhugashvili. He was very proud of having
spoken to Lenin, and of having, as it seemed to him, made
a strong impression on him. "For the Erivan affair there
can't be evidence of anything against anybody, so there
won't be any against you, either."
'I'll go to the Observatory, but I won't take the money to
Finland."
"And I'm not ordering you to," said Koba. He had long
since decided that Kamo would take it there alone; he
trusted him.
liNor can you order me to do anything!"
Without answering Koba turned to Kamo again. He repeated his orders tersely and clearly; he knew Kamo didn't
understand the first time.
Yes, he knows his business, it's true. But in all my life
I've never seen anyone so repugnant to me, thought Jambul, listening attentively. After finishing his explanation
Koba stood up. The audience is over! thought Jambul.
Kamo and Maro stood up at once, too.
The astronomer, a graybeard in a silken jacket, was
showing the Observatory to a small group of visitors and
wearily making the usual explanations:
THE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
"The man whose portrait you see hanging on this wall
was the great astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. He was
born in 1473 and died in 1543. For a long time he was
thought to be a German, but that was incorrect. Copernicus was a Pole. He discovered that it was not the sun that
rotated around the earth, but the earth that rotated
around the sun. He worked with the aid of a parallactic
instrument consisting of three little pieces of wood with
three degrees. Later on these little stumps of wood passed
into the possession of another famous astronomer, Tycho
Brahe, who treasured them as a sacrosanct relic of the history of science, and wrote verses about them. In these he
said that the earth produced a man like that once in a
thousand years: he stopped the sun and started the earth
moving. For a long time Copernicus couldn't make up his
mind to publish his discovery: he was afraid of being persecuted by the Catholic Church and even more afraid of being laughed at by everyone. It was not until shortly before
his death that he published his immortal work. He dedicated it to Pope Paulus Ill, but it was included by the Congregation in the notorious Index as heresy. Though this
great man was a believer, it may well be that only a miracle
saved him from the stake," said the astronomer, who evidently disliked the Catholic Church. "His work of genius
is entitled De revolutionibus orbium caelestium. There is
a monument to Copernicus in Warsaw, the work of
Thorwaldsen ... "
The word "revolutionibus" caught Jambul's attention.
So there's some kind of a revolution there, too, he
thought, though not the same one. He glanced at the
gaunt, harassed face with the tufts of hair falling on both
sides of the head. Yes, that's not like Koba's face ... Who
knows what sort of a man he was and what he thought
about life? ... So he was a believer? But could he have believed in everything? Did he believe in an afterlife? But
surely he was more intelligent than I, with Kamo and
Koba, even with Lenin thrown in!. If I had any real faith in
me I wouldn't choose such a life for myself. But then what
would I do? The little stumps of wood with degrees are not
for me. I have no gifts at all. But when, why, and what for,
did I ever choose such an inhuman existence? Caucasian
independence? But it's only various Kobas that are probably going to run it after all, and what's the use of hiding from myself that they're a hundred times worse than
the Voronov-Dashkovs. And people like Tsintsadze or
Ramishvili are basically the same liberals as the Spasoviches and Kovalevskys, they can hardly be told apart.
They'll hardly be the ones to come to power, if there's a
revolution, any more than the Kovalevskys will come to
power in Russia. And that's just the reason they won't, because they're civilized, and not wild beasts! he thought, astonished himself at the swiftness with which his attitude
towards the revolution had changed. Nevertheless, he
thought, it's not just because of that bay horse!
The astronomer announced that the tour was over. The
visitors started out. At the exit Jambullooked around again
75
�and went into Erivan Square still at the same artificially
unhurried pace with which he now walked around the
city. His body was alert and tensed in case of an unexpected onslaught. Since the expropriation he had not been
separated from his revolver, though this had no point;
there really was no evidence against him, and if arrested he
would in all likelihood not be hanged.
A few people were standing in the street at the same
spot where the first bomb had fallen. One of them was explaining something, pointing at the jumbled stones. Jam·
bullistened in. Yes, that's probably a blood-stain. Here is
where that Cossack fell who was leaping around the phaeton. But I didn't kill him. Except for the horse, I didn't kill
anyone. He walked on to the newspaper kiosk, stopped
where he had stood then, and again saw the Tiflis Gazette.
He took a few more steps, looked at the place-and suddenly felt sick.
In the Annona restaurant, where there were always a
great many people and there was no chance of arrest, he
sat down for a breathing-spell. He could hardly eat, but he
drank some wine, and listened to the string orchestra. At
the little tables around him people were discussing their
affairs. "We'll have to think all that through and through,"
one of them said.
Yes, and I'll have to think things through and through.
Perhaps I've thought about life, about the most important
things, very little. Now it's too late. Though why is it too
late? There's no one to talk about it with. Koba's a beast.
Kamo's a hero. Everyone claims he's kindhearted, and
here he was getting ready to impale people on a stake!
How strange he used to be religious! Now of course he
makes fun of faith: Koba taught him that. .. Yes, I'm get·
ting old and didn't notice ... I'll have to go see father as
quickly as possible. Thoughts flashed incoherently
through his mind.
On the way home he went in to see the men whose address he used for letters. There was only a telegram from
76
Turkey. He hastily tore it open, ripping the end off the
envelope. It was from an old friend telling that his father
has passed away that night in his sleep, painlessly.
It was evident that the director of the Observatory sym·
pathized with the expropriators. It was, however, possible,
though unlikely, that he didn't know what there was in the
new mattress on his divan. In a short while Dzhugashvili
had drawn everything out of the mattress, and Kamo had
carried it to Lenin in Kuakalla. This time he no longer traveled first-class but second, and was not a Wing Adjutant,
but a mere junior officer.
Krupskaya and Bogdanova sewed the money in the
quilted waistcoat of their comrade, Lyadov. "It sat on me
very skilfully," wrote Lyadov, "and the money was carried
across the border illegally without any trouble."
At the State Bank, however, the numbers of the stolen
five-hundred-ruble notes had been recorded, and they
were wired instantly to every police department in Europe. The five-hundred-ruble notes were exchanged in
batches in various West European banks. In trying to convert them Litvinov, Semashko, Ravich, and a few other
Bolsheviks were arrested. In this way the smaller Central
Committee, that is, Lenin, Krasin, and Bogianov, lost a
small part of the money.
Aside from this there was some unpleasantness with the
Mensheviks, who launched an "agitation," that it was im·
proper having anything in common with "rogues." They
abused Lenin and Kamo in the most horrifying language.
But Lenin was not too vexed by the unpleasantness. At his
dictation Krupskaya added the following to a personal let·
ter of his about this affair: "The Mensheviks have already
started the vilest brawl. They're doing such vile things it's
hard to believe ... What sons-of-bitches! ... "
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�SUMMER
The thrushes' voices, liquid every evening.
Whole hours pass
Soundless but for the rustling
Of maple trees whose leaves,
Flake upon flake of dusky turquoise,
Encrust some liquid inner richness. Summer.
Summer! Unnumbered days pace through a desert
Empty of landmarks, colored scratchy gold.
But the whole mirage
Dappled with havens for birds to perch in
Will have vanished by October
No matter how passionately put together.
Country created root and branch,
Whose every pod and blossom,
Hayfield, hilltop, cloud
Have come to tingle with mythology ...
A tall white horse bridled in green
Passes and repasses on a carousel
That whisks repeatedly out of reach.
Under the pine trees trails make soft
Chiasmuses. This has all
Been marked long since on his chart by the master
Of subterranean bonds. Inside the house
A room at the top of the stairs
Smells of old puppets, contains a twangy piano
Kin to the sea-clogged one that you remember.
Outdoors as well are portents to be noted.
The way the light falls;
One particular maple, lightning-lopped,
Motionless and imposing
As a statue in the meadow;
A dead elm's gesture
Past boggy grass to where the woods begin;
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
77
�Caw of a crow, hawk hovering
Over the line that separates sun from shadow.
What will you do with your life?
Long interlude. The elm and maple wait.
Slats of light
Lean down on you pacing
Through gawky trees that strain for their share of sky,
Teabrown swampjuice slurping underfoot.
The years till now:
This rusty leafchoked bucket once held sap.
Into the trackless competitive hardwood
Dip till the dimness sends you back uphill,
Daylight returning at the top of the rise.
House in a hollow,
Smoke dissolving into early evening,
Somebody playing that piano,
Face or phantom at the attic window:
Benevolent and tiny, it all
Happened repeatedly but long ago.
To an accumulated depth of water
Plummets the pebble thrown, and ripples spread.
The whole of summer will have been one long day.
MAGNOLIAS IN PRINCETON
in memory of Sidonie M. Clauss
Puppies run around the pool
outside the Woodrow Wilson School.
On a bench I try to read,
magnolias dropping overhead,
lavish lacy opening
in the clinging sheath of spring.
Petals milky·pinky pale
slather whiteness like a veil
over the grey branches' bone,
over smudges of light green.
On a sunny afternoon
gorgeous garlands bloom and preen.
78
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Yet a single wintry breath
dooms this Rubens world to death.
Half an hour of cold's enough
to wrinkle creamy rose to rough
russet, parch the baby cheek
and shrink it to a shrivelled scrape
rustling along the stones,
silken skin to rattling bones.
Cold can cut the flowering short.
So can changes in the light.
Take that radiant bridal air
fresh magnolia blossoms wear:
one dark cloud blots out the sun,
all the joyful glow is gone.
Quenched and drawn, they shrink to white,
livid, glaring, harshly bright.
Where then can I look for stable
radiance: perhaps the marble
neoclassically flashing
columns of the Wilson School,
or the snowy puppies dashing
round the azure of the pool,
or the court's blond travertine,
or the trees' faint new green?
None of these. It's going to rain.
Plum-dark clouds come like a stain.
Damp wind ruffles pages, hair,
piled dry petals, and the air.
To avoid the looming cloud,
I prepare to join the crowd
moving up the temple stair.
Petals twitch and stir and fall
as slowly up the scholars file;
the magnolia bank springs leaks
through which distant thunder speaks.
Wait. A tiny ruffling tap.
Here's a petal in my lap,
newly fallen from a branch
as I got up from the bench,
longer than my finger, fresh,
plump, and fragrant, bruised like flesh.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
79
�Slowly I shut my book on this bookmark,
this touch of perfect color blown
undramatically down,
its pink and white already edged with dark.
THE SERVICE FOR SIDONIE
May 3 1980
The rain it raineth every day.
Not this one.
Our fumbling gestures sketching out your loss
preserved as if in amber by May sun.
The dreadful hole no sooner dug than spring
gently conspired to fill it. The two babies'
babbling purled, a rhythmic little brook,
under and through the ceremony's broken
flow (the hushed voices, bubbles burst in weeping).
Inflamed, turned inward, all our eyes were dazzled
at the chapel door by a great blaze of noon
and when we left the porch and stood in the sun
birds embroidered the quiet
with brilliant stitches of incessant song.
Ironic, tender-natural renewal,
brimming with green abundance, speaks of cycle.
But for us mourning you no rhythm softens
today's shared truth. This thing the grace of season
so gently twines its tendrils round remains
a terrible cessation-opening blossom,
richly unfolding, ruthlessly cut off.
RACHEL HADAS
Rachel Hadas published her first book of poems, Starting from Troy, in
1975 (Godine). Her second, Slow Transparency, will appear in September
1983 (Wesleyan University Press). She teaches English at Rutgers University in Newark.
80
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Letters on Legitimacy
Guglielmo Ferrero-Gaetano Mosca
A Note on Guglielmo Ferrero-and his Friendship with
Gaetano Mosca
From 1896 to the end of their lives, a few months apart, at the
end of 1941 and in the middle of 1942, Gaetano Mosca (18581941) and Guglielmo Ferrero (1871-1942) carried on frequent correspondence. Two hundred and twenty-five Letters survive, probably less than a third of the total. In 1896 Ferrero was twenty-five
years old and at work on his first book to win wide recognition,
L' Europa giovane (1897)-the fruit of three years of study and
travel throughout Europe. Thirty-eight years old, Mosca had iust
won the chair of constitutional law at Turin and published the first
edition of Elementi di Scienza Politica-a work that achieved
something of the status of a classic. (A later edition was translated
into English with the title The Ruling Class, New York 1939).
Mosca appreciated the importance of Ferrero's work almost from
the beginning with an essay II fenomeno Ferrero (1897), published
long before Ferrero won international status.
Their correspondence is an extension of their work. Often on almost a day-to-day basis, it discusses the major events of twentieth
century history, the reasons for decadence in Europe, and especially
in Italy, before the First World War, the First World War and the
crisis that came of it, the coming of Fascism in 1922, and Ferrero's
and Mosca's struggle against it within Italy until1925 when open
opposition became impossible, and finally, the dark years that
made the Second World War inescapable. Throughout these letters
the ideas that are to play an important part in their thinking take
shape and modify.
Both Mosca and Ferrero took direct part in political life, Mosca as
a deputy in Parliament from 1908 to 1919 and Senator after 1919,
Ferrero as a frequent political commentator. This involvement in
actual political life lent their work a straightforward and practical
cast that, in their instances, made for a deeper grasp, rather than an
These four letters come from a collection of the surviving FerreroMosca correspondence edited by C. Mongardini, Gaetano Mosca- Guglielmo Ferrero. Carteggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
evasion, of the underlying problems. Both men knew, and in many
instances were intimate with, the leading men of their times. They
had the best information at their disposal, and had read enough of
the right kind of old books to know its limitations. In some sense
the clarity of their view of the public affairs of Italy and Europe,
and of their grasp of the crisis of the twentieth century, testifies to
the depth of their friendship. For them the understanding of public
events, especially the events of crisis, were not an evasion of private
life, but an understanding of the place of their lives in their country
and time, and finally in the whole history of the West. Each of
them was happy enough to be able to grasp the symptoms of the
catastrophe, long before it occurred, that threatened to sweep away
all they loved.
Besides Elementi di Scienza Politica, the only other major work
of Mosca's translated into English is Storia delle dottrine pelitiche
(Bari 1937), A Short History of Political Philosophy (New York
1972). Most of Ferrero's work is translated into English and the
other major languages of Europe.
In his early and middle thirties in 1902-1906, Ferrero published
an account of the self-destruction of the Roman republic and the
settlement of Augustus in five volumes, The Greatness and Decline of Rome. Written in simple narrative style the work is overwhelming in its capacity to evoke and to understand, in its appetite
for life and intelligence. It won Ferrero a world-wide audience, an
audience that made it possible for Ferrero's voice to be heard
throughout the West, even after Fascist censorship prevented publication of his words within Italy after 1925. The work caused an
uproar in the academic world of Italy.
Throughout his life Ferrero wrote weekly columns and monthly
articles that appeared in the major newspapers and magazines of
the world. Some of these articles were collected into books and published every few years: Militarism (London 1902); Europe's Fateful Hour (New York 1911, 1918); Between the Old World and the
New (New York 1914); Ancient Rome and Modern America (New
York 1914); Four Years of Fascism (London 1924); Words to the
Deaf (London 1926); The Unity of the World (London 1931).
In the twenties Ferrero dedicated himself to a cycle of novelsunder the general title La Terza Roma: Le due verita (Milan
81
�1926); La rivolta del figlio (Milan 1927); Gli ultimi barbari, sud ore
e sangue (Milan 1930); Liberazione (Lugano 1936)-that told the
story of Italy since its unification, a subject whose evasion up to
then, in Ferrero's judgement, contributed importantly to the collapse of the Italian government after the First World War. Of all
Ferrero's works, his novels were least read.
Under constant police surveillance after 1926, Ferrero left Italy,
it turned out forever, in 1930-with the help of Mosca who inter·
vened with the Minister of Foreign Affairs to get him a passport.
The University of Geneva and the Institut Universitaire des
Hautes Etudes Intemationales had offered him a chair in modem
history-his first university position. At about sixty he entered into
one of the most courageous and creative periods of historical study
in his life. At the university for more than ten years he gave a
weekly lecture on the history of the French Revolution and Napo·
leon and the consequences of misunderstanding these events in the
nineteenth century-a lecture that was an event in the town as well
as at the university. At the institute Ferrero dedicated himself to
the study of the differences between war in the eighteenth century
and the unlimited total war of Napoleon-a study that led him to
the rediscovery ofVattel, the author of the eighteenth century clas·
sic of international law, Le droit des gens, ou principe de la loi
naturelle, appliquee a la conduite et aux affaires des nations et
des souverains (Leyden 1758).
One of the most important of Ferrero's little books, Peace and
War (London 1933) came out of this study of war. He argued that
part of the catastrophe of 1914-1917 came because statesmen and
generals were ignorant of the character of the war they were fighting and above all had misunderstood the meaning of Napoleon.
His lectures at the university led to four volumes on the French
Revolution and the crisis it brought Europe and the world: The
Two French Revolutions 1789-1796 (posthumously published,
New York 1968); The Gamble, Bonaparte in Italy, 1796-1797
(London 1939); The Reconstruction of Europe, Talleyrand and
the Congress of Vienna, (New York 1941); The Principles of
Power (New York 1942).
In all his historical work Ferrero studied the past in order to discover the present-the opposite of studying the past because one
thinks one understands the present, which often leads to a politicization of the past in the service of present prejudices. Ferrero had
no favourite ages. His grasp of human character and the common
sense that comes of it was too strong for such infatuation. He did
not idealize any times-which meant he did not flinch before tragedy and outrage but still kept a remarkable love of life. He suffered
much, but his work never betrays resignation and depression.
For Mosca, see James H. Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class
(Ann Arbor 1958). The Istituto de Studi Storico-Politici of the Uni·
versity of Rome is bringing out his complete works. For a preliminary bibliography of Ferrero's writings, see Guglielmo Ferrero, histoire et politique au vingtif:me siecle, Geneva 1966. For an
account of the surveillance of Ferrero under Fascism, based on police archives, see Helmut Goetz "Guglielmo Ferrero, Ein Exampel
totalitaerer Verfolgung," Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 61, Tuebingen 1981, 248-304,
which should be compared to Leo Ferrero, Diario di un privilegiato
sotto il fascismo, Turin 1946. L.R.
82
1920
Mosca to Ferrero
Turin, January 28, 1920 Corso Umberto 45
Dear Ferrero,
I received with the usual delay your card of the 18th,
which avoided the postal strike only to fall into the railway·
men's strike. I had previously received the Memorie e con·
fessioni di un sovrano deposto, * which I have already read
and am turning over in my mind.
In the first part it seems to me that, among the many
original ideas, two stand out. The first concerns the great
French Revolution which, while purporting to bring liberty, equality, etc., gave the people instead military con·
scription (timidly already begun by absolute governments
here and there) and a world of taxes and constraints. The
second concerns the Holy Alliance, which you say was
more equitable than the victors in the recent war, and
would have been more able to develop Wilson's idea of a
League of Nations and which, as you rightly observe, even
if it did not give us perpetual peace, at least assured peace
for the span of a generation.
In regard to this second idea, I think that you are indis·
putably right. The principle of legitimacy that guided the
Allies of 1815 produced less injustices and exercised less
coercion on the will of peoples than the victors of the
present day, attempting to organize Europe on the princi·
pie of nationality and the so-called self-determination of
nations. The sovereigns of 1815 were more generous and
moderate toward the defeated. They had more sense of
measure than the leaders of the democracies of today.
They were more consistent in applying the principle they
said inspired them. Now, instead, the principle of self·
determination has been applied in such a way that the
peace treaties prevent the German provinces of Austria
from joining Germany. An enormous-and shamefulinconsistency.
As for the first idea, I still hesitate to say that you are
entirely right. Yes, the revolution did much harm, but it
also did much good. Perhaps almost all the good could
have been achieved without almost all the harm or, at
least, without a great part of it. But you, who are a real
historian, know how difficult it is to reconstruct history on
the basis of an hypothesis, how difficult it is to know what
would have happened if, at a given moment, events had
*Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto (Memoirs and Confessions
of a Deposed Sovereign), Milan 1920. Ferrero called this book "a summary of the history of the nineteenth century" inspired by the memoirs
ofTalleyrand and his principle of legitimacy. Cf. B. Raditsa, Colloqui con
Guglielmo Ferrero, Lugano 1939,73-74.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�developed in a different way from how they did develop. I
remember that Louis XVIII, to whose /TIOderation and political views you rightly pay tribute, used to say that we
couldn't speak ill of the Revolution because it had done so
much good and we couldn't speak well of it because it had
done so much harm. I very nearly agree with him. And let
us go on to the second part where there seem to be two
basic ideas: (!) that Germany should have won the war
and instead she lost it, or, at least, that she lost where she
deserved to win; and (2) that Germany was, in a way,
forced to make war by the atmosphere that took hold of
Europe in the ten or twenty years before the war.
Never mind about whether Germany deserved to win. I
admit that, if the sacrifices Germany made and the terrible
sufferings she inflicted on herself and on her adversaries
entitled her to win, then she deserved it. But . . . after
America entered the war, she was the weaker. She could
hope only in some striking bit of good luck, which did not
occur, or in the cowardice of her enemies, who were not
free to be cowards. The governments of the Entente could
not present themselves as defeated before peoples of
whom they had asked such great sacrifices. Besides, the
abyss of revolution was behind them if they stepped backwards. Perhaps one of them will fall into it anyhow-but
victory was the only hope of salvation. And Germany, as
the weaker, behaved like a gambler who has little money.
She took the greatest risks. Once they failed, she was done
for.
As for the causes of the war and the responsibilities for
its unleashing, I agree with you that certainly not all the
fault is Germany's and the Kaiser's. For ten years and
more the European bourgeoisies had been more or less afflicted with imperialism, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps
in order to take people's minds off socialism. This created
the atmosphere in which the appalling war could break
out. Part of the responsibiiity lies also with the diplomatic
encirclement which England practiced against Germany.
Germany, however, was responsible for provoking the incident which provoked the explosion. As a result that good
part of the world that doesn't see beyond its nose believed
and believes that the entire fault was hers.
And now that Satan, as you say, has finished the job,
what is this poor tortured and suffering world to do?
If you are right, salvation could come from a restoration
of the principle of authority, from rulers with enough
moral prestige not to have to rely exclusively on brute
force. But is this possible in a democratic regime, where
the best way to rise is to humiliate oneself before the
crowd, to flatter it indecently?
Neither of us knows whether or not the world will overcome the present crisis and if present institutions can endure. If they don't, we shall, for sure, fall under demagogic
tyranny, or under bureaucratic and military tyranny or,
worse still, under both together. And Italy, closest to the
looming danger, is not yet aware of it!
I'll come to see you in the spring and we'll talk. I hope to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
publish a review of your book. Its main points will be those
I have just made.
My family is well. My respects to Mrs. Ferrero. Greetings to Leo.
I am most affectionately,
G. Mosca.
P.S. Please send me the exact address of your brother, the
doctor, who is in Ancona. I should perhaps write to him.
Ferrero to Mosca
(F1orence), January 31, 1920
Dear Gaetano,
Thanks for your letter. My brother's address is: Dr.
Giuseppe Ferrero, Via Montirozzo 59, Ancona.
To understand the book you have to proceed a bit by
deduction, since the writer's real ideas are hidden behind
the ideas-thesis and antithesis-attributed to the supposed author, to keep him in character. What you say
about the Holy Alliance is exactly what I think; it stands
out more in the second than in the first part since in the
first part the sovereign accuses the Holy Alliance of having
been too pacifist, traditionalist, classical, and Catholic, in
spirit if not in religion.
· It is not the same thing with the French Revolution. I
didn't try to decide whether the Revolution was a good
thing or a bad, whether it did more good than harm,
whether it could have done the good that it did without
doing so much harm. These are insoluble problems, because there is no way of measuring exactly the good and
the harm that it did and to make a comparison between
them. My idea-which I meant to have come out of the
thesis and antithesis-is this. In the French Revolution
there is a contradiction among the formulas, the programs,
the doctrines, and the results. This contradiction, disguised during the whole nineteenth century and up to the
World War with a host of devices and compromises, has
now broken quite out of control. The doctrines promised
men liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but events have
yielded a discipline far more demanding, heavy, and oppressive than that exercised by former governments. They
brought up governments harsher and more violent because they are at the same time stronger and less authoritative, governments that now are all turning into tyrannies
based on money and brute force. And all this happened
because the French Revolution undermined all the principles of authority, with their religious basis, of the old regimes and put in their place a new principle, the will or
sovereignty of the people, which doesn't work because it is
based only on a function and can give rise only to electoral
machines. On this point I have come to embrace totally
83
�your ideas, over which I was for a long time hesitant. For
many years I thought that the sovereignty of the people
was a serious principle of authority and could serve as the
basis of a juster, less oppressive, milder, and more human
political and social order than the one that went before.
Deeper study of the nineteenth century, a hard look at reality and longer reflection have persuaded me that you
were right.
Hence I don't doubt that the present order of things
is fated to crumble more or less everywhere and to be
replaced by a militaristic and demagogic tyranny, as arbitrary, capricious, oppressive and cruel as the worst despo·
tisms of the past. What is said on pages 289* and 311 represents my thinking.** I am so persuaded of these things
that already I am preparing myself for this unsparing, bestial despotism by, among other things, cutting down my
needs, luxuries, and expenses, because I am sure it will
leave me only my eyes to weep. Never mind, as long as it
leaves me a pen to write! As for the rebirth of the principle
of authority, to which there is reference on page 311, I believe it is inevitable but in the distant future. We shan't
live to see it. Probably this new principle of authority will
take shape around the persons, institutions, and doctrines
which will defend men against this horrid tyranny.
In short, I think that the movement that began in the
eighteenth century for the liberation of man has come to a
dreadful tyranny and a reign of force: a formidable contradiction from which there must come a political, moral, and
intellectual crisis of vast proportions of the sort that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages, when the Church
became the negation in practice of every principle of the
Gospel. We are in a situation which, in certain regards, recalls the one that gave rise to the explosion of the Reformation and the wars of religion.
As for the pages in which the deposed sovereign says
that Germany should have won the war, it seems to me
that you attribute to them a conclusive value whereas, to
me, they are of only passing importance. The second part
of the book was conceived as a medley of fragments written in accordance with tormenting changes of thought
and feeling under the impact of a blow of misfortune.
Hence there are contradictions, successive stages, jumps.
*The passage referred to runs:
"Men have deposed God and overturned all the idols they had tried to
build on his profaned altars: Science, Liberty, Democracy, Progress, Civilization. All authorities have collapsed. Therefore, force alone rules the
world. Force alone and naked, or barely covered with a red rag or a tatter
of a national flag. It rules the world as it can, with excesses and stops and
starts, without discernment, and tears it apart, for force is so weak when
alone and naked. 0 men, do not harbour illusions: in Europe the only
authority that remains is gold and iron."
**"Slowly and cautiously throughout all of Western civilization, the Revolution has done its work, the work it botched brutally in an hour in
France. Undoing the sacred legitimacy of all authorities, it has left men
no other government than force. From one end of Europe to the other,
force and need are the only authorities-both fake-men still obey."
84
The sovereign says, in his first notes, that Germany should
have won the war but, further on, he realizes that Germany was destroyed by its own strength, that it was defeated because it was too strong and had wanted to be too
strong. My real opinion on this point is expressed on pages
216-217: "Germany had to lose, because it was the
stronger ... n
~~we
wanted to be too strong ... "
This second part of the fifth chapter on confessionspages 212-223-is extremely important, because it contains the development of one of the book's most important
ideas. The first part of the chapter has a purely artistic reason for being, expressing thoughts which, in the second
part, are confuted. At bottom it serves to recall, in fitting
summary manner, the history of the war and Germany's
formidable effort. It is a warning to the states and statesmen of the Entente, who delude themselves that they defeated Germany with the power of the spirit when they
did it with the power of matter. In short, the three ideas
that I wanted to stress with the thesis and antithesis and
that are like Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth are the
following:
a) The French Revolution began a struggle between
the old principles of authority and its own principles. For
the reasons I have explained above, this struggle ended in
the ruin of all principles, old and new. As a result, Europe
after hoping for freedom for a century, has fallen under
brute force-anarchy or tyranny.
b) The world war is not the usual war won by the best
army or the army used the best. It is the bizarre, incoherent, chaotic catastrophe of a political and military system.
In this catastrophe all states exceeded the measure of
force granted human organizations. Institutions absurd in
their principles and dangerous in their exaggeration,
above all conscription armies as they developed after 1870,
were the means of this excess.
c) The responsibilities of Germany, enormous as they
are, are only partial, because from 1789 on all of Europe is
responsible. The World War is the final outcome of the
entire history of the nineteenth century-with the exception of the period from 1815 to 1848. The whole history of
Europe flowed toward this outlet. The whole history of
Europe has been an uninterrupted preparation of this catastrophe-except for the attempt of the old dynasties between 1815 and 1848 to move against the stream. That period from 1815 to 1848 strikes me as the only period when
Europe was governed with real political wisdom. Despite
its faults it would deserve rehabilitation.
If you want to write a review, these elucidations may be
useful to you. My wife holds it against me that I have written a book that is something of a riddle. I must help my
friends unravel it.
Warmest greetings,
yours Guglielmo
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�1923
Ferrero to Mosca
F1orence, May 6, 1923, 7, Viale Machiavelli
Dear Gaetano,
I have read the Elementi.* I am happy, above all, at the
freshness of your thirty-year old book. Except for a few unimportant points it could have been written today. The
outlook on the world, the spirit of the research have not
aged at all, so that reading it, one has no impression of go·
ing back a whole generation. This means that your book
has deep, vital roots. When a book stands up against the
passage of thirty years it has passed the hardest test, and
may endure for three hundred, because it is endowed with
eternal elements.
The new part completes, or rather, develops the old, by
introducing into the synthetic vision the new events and
phenomena of the last thirty years, and your further expe·
riences. You have made two books written with thirty
years between them into one book, without changing or
rewriting the first. This is a rare, perhaps unique, occurrence, and worthy of note.
What I like best in the book is what I might call its ancient spirit, that psychological realism whose origin lies in a
deep, because long thought-out, knowledge of the human
soul, a knowledge that is the necessary basis of politics,
since politics is only psychology in action. I say that your
book is soaked in the spirit of the ancients, because they
had in high degree the same deep-seated realism. You referred in the preface to Aristotle's Politics, and rightly, because your book has an honorable place in the same family. How different from the nebulous ideological fantasies
in which so many political writers are lost today!
This is the most serious, thoughtful, mature, profound
book on politics to appear in Europe in recent years. It
comes at a time at which it is most needed to lead bewildered minds back to the eternal reality of human affairs, in
which alone lies the secret of the good fortune and pros.
perity of nations. Let's hope that it is read and meditated
upon to the extent it deserves. For my part I'll do my best.
I must voice two objections or reservations of a general
character. It seems to me that you don't give sufficient importance to what you call the political formula and I call
the principle of legitimacy of governments. You seem still
to consider it a sort of pia fraus or conventional lie, useful
for justifying governmental power above all in the eyes of
the ignorant masses. I am increasingly persuaded that it is
*Elementi di Scienza Politica, Turin 1896; second edition (here referred
to), Turin 1923. English translation, The Ruling Class, New York and
London 1939.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the essential part of government and that force is only a
subordinate element, which has no true effectiveness unless it is based on the first. A government is not the real
thing unless it has persuaded all those who obey it that it
has a right to command. This is the test of all governments,
not the collecting of policemen and soldiers for the purpose of beating up recalcitrants, a police operation in
which even a Lenin, a Mussolini, and similar revolutionary
bunglers can succeed. And periods in which the right of
the government to command is uncertain and insecure are
always troubled, even if the government has great force at
its disposal.
The other reservation is this. I don't think you have
gauged the true importance of the upheaval that took
place in European civilization in the nineteenth century.
You seem to consider it a normal development of civilization, along familiar lines. But I don't see it that way.
There was a break, an overturning, a violent interruption
of the line, an attempt to overthrow some of the principles
on which all civilizations rested until the eighteenth century. To me this is a point of capital importance. Almost all
the objections which I should make to points of detail
stem from this different way of looking at the nineteenth
century.
I find, here and there, a few unimportant errors. StoJy.
pin** was not killed with bombs but with a revolver shot at
him by a student when he was sitting in a theater. Augustus did not frequently renew the Senate because the nationalistic reaction which, after Actium, brought him to
the presidency and kept him there all his life, did not allow
him or his successors to introduce many new senators.
The first to conduct an operation of this kind was Vespasian, who did not take the new families from Italy, as you
say, but from the western provinces-Cisalpine Gau~
Gaul, above all Spain, and from North Africa. Under Vespasian the Senate, which was what we might call centralItalian, became Euro-Africanl To my knowledge, under
Vespasian and in the second century, there were not many
oriental members. The East was always unwilling to accept Roman political ideas-aristocratic and republican up
to the end of the third century-that instead spread widely
among the Romanized and civilized barbarians of the
West. The East remained faithful to absolute monarchy.
This explains why the West and not the East replenished
the Roman Senate, up to the collapse of the system in the
third century.
I'm getting ready to write about your book. Greetings to
your family.
Yours
Guglielmo Ferrero
**Peter Arcadievich Stolypin {1862-1911), Russian statesman. Prime
minister in 1906, he fought revolutionary ferment with reforms, among
them agrarian reform that dissolved the mir and allowed the peasants to
own property.
85
�1934
Ferrero to Mosca
Geneva, February 17, 1934
Dear Gaetano,
I've read the book of your lessons.* It's rich, substantial,
clear, full of ideas and briskly written, apt for pleasant and
quick reading. I hope it finds many readers. Italy would
need to read books like yours.
The exposition of the doctrines of yours I know seems
precise and exact. And so I extend the same judgment to
those that are new to me. If I have any reservations, it's
about the overly intellectualizing tendency of the book. It
seems to me that you lend too much importance to ideas
as inspiring events. Ideas, in my opinion, are often the
horse-flies of history.
Rousseau, for in-stance. 1 believe that Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution has been enormously exaggerated. In the course on the Revolution that I gave here
three years ago, I maintained that Rousseau didn't make
the Revolution but that the Revolution created Rousseau.** Rousseau's books had made a certain dent but
only on a small number of people who, later, for the most
part, were against the Revolution. But when the Convention found itself isolated and without other support than
assemblage of forces amid a France in ruins, it needed, at
least, a theory to justify its power. It latched onto The Social Contract, glorifying it and making it into a sort of Bible
of democracy.
As for what you say about socialism, I think it isn't at all
exact to say that political equality makes for economic
equality. This is an argument conservatives have abused
for the last hundred years but which seems to me unfounded. The old regime was founded on political and economic inequality; the rich had all the power. I don't believe it's possible to return to this state of affairs, which
collapsed because it was excessive. Equality, economic
and political together, is impossible unless we crystallize
labor into absurd forms. I believe, therefore, that, after
many convulsions and oscillations, the world will adapt to
a state of political equality and economic inequality, such
as a number of countries have already reached. Political
equality will compensate for economic inequality, to the
advantage of the poor. Socialism has, in fact, been more
successful in countries where the government had an oligarchic and aristocratic character and there was still considerable political inequality-Russia, Germany, Austria,
Italy-than in countries where economic inequalities are
great but political equality is ensured by democratic institutions-such as the United States and England before
1914.
The theory of the political formula seems to me also to
need reenforcement. I should substitute this somewhat
neutral phrase with another, more vigorous: principle of legitimacy. Among African blacks or barbarians facts and
rights may coincide: whoever possesses the material instruments of power is thought to have the right to command. Little by little, as a country becomes more civilized,
the fact of possessing the instruments of power no longer
suffices. These instruments must have been acquired with
the observance of certain rules and principles which confer the right, recognized by all, to govern. Outside these
principles there is no longer a legitimate government;
there is usurpation. Whereas you seem to consider the political formula as a sort of plaything or game, which serves,
at best, to moderate the rulers, it seems to me that the
principle of legitimacy is a matter of the utmost seriousness, solemnity, and necessity. It is the very essence of civilization. A civilized people that falls from a legitimate government to a government of usurpation becomes infantile
again. Today, alas, two-thirds of the world's governments
are illegitimate usurpations. During the last twenty years
the world has precipitated into barbarism, just because a
large number of old legitimate governments have fallen
and made way for usurpations. For how long?! That's the
great question.
But we would need to talk all this over face to face. Cordial greetings and good wishesG. F.
Translated by Frances Frenaye
*Mosca's Lezioni di storia delle dottrine e delle instituzioni politiche,
Rome 1932.
**The last version of this course, given at the University of Geneva in
1940-1942 was published almost ten years after Ferrero's death in 1942:
Les deux revolutions francaises, 1789-1796, Neuchatel 1951. English
translation, G. Ferrero, The Two French Revolutions 1789-1796, New
York 1968.
86
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Guglielmo Ferrero and Legitimacy
Carlo Mongardini
Guglielmo Ferrero understood that in our century the
fundamental question for politicians and statesmen was
no longer the exercise of power by an organized minority,
but how to build legitimacy from below. Gaetano Mosca
and Vilfredo Pareto also knew this was the problem.
Mosca opened the academic year of 1902-03 at the University of Turin with a lecture, "The Aristocratic and
Democratic Principle in the Past and Future." 1 In 1920
Pareto wrote a series of articles in the Rivista di Milano on
the transformation of democracy. 2 But neither Mosca nor
Pareto were up to dealing with this in part new subject
because each conceived the structure of power to hinge
on elites and the substitution of one elite for another (Mosca's "circulation of elites"). Ferrero, instead, made legiti~
macy the central question in interpreting contemporary
history and saw it as the key to understanding the crisis of
the modern world.
Ferrero did not think of himself as a professional historian.3 He turned to history in the spirit of Taine,4 one of
his models, uin order to recover, in the comparison of past
and present, the today almost completely lost awareness of
certain rules of life that cannot be transgressed without
running into the reason of things." 5 His avowed desire to
"divide the study of history not into epochs ... but by
types of phenomena";6 his conception of the study of history not as an "effort to recall the past," but as "an exercise
in recognizing the differences and similarities between
past and present," show his concentration on understand·
ing the changes taking place in the society of his day. This
meant-as in the instance of Taine-a new kind of history, not political history, but the history of civil society or
rather of the changes in civil society. The orientation on
Carlo Mongardini is professor of political science at the polytechnic in
Milan. He recently edited the surviving correspondence of Gaetano
Mosca and Guglielmo Ferrero, Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Ferrero. Car-
teggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980.
The above article was read at a congress on Ferrero, "Guglielmo Ferrero,
tra societa e politica," at the University of Genova on October 4-5, 1982.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
society allows the application of the categories employed
in studying and interpreting the present to the past (in the
case of Ferrero to ancient Rome) .. In another sense, Ferrero simply pursues the comparison of present and past,
Hthe differences and similarities."
Ferrero was, above all, a student of society, or, as he put
it, a student of "some problems of individual and collective
life."7 We should not be surprised that such study turned
out largely political. By nature and almost by historical necessity, the study of society in Italy is political. 8 Like Mosca's theory of the political class, Ferrero's concern with legitimacy had clearly contemporary relevance. In 1923
Ferrero wrote Mosca of the significance of the principle of
legitimacy:
A government is not the real thing unless it has persuaded all
those who obey it that it has the right to command. This is the
test of all governments. Not the recruitment of a few policemen and soldiers to beat up recalcitrants-a police operation
in which even a Lenin, a Mussolini and other such Revolutionary bunglers can succeed. And times in which the right of
the government to command is uncertain and insecure are
always troubled, even if the government has great forces at its
disposal 9
To understand Ferrero's total concentration on the
principles of legitimacy, we have to recall his experience
under Fascism-clearly revealed in his correspondence,
especially in his letters to Mosca. Mosca's theory of the political class had been an argument against the corruption
of parliamentary democracy; Ferrero's concept of legitimacy was an intellectual weapon against Fascism's violence. In search of a principle oflegitimacy to give stability
to the rule and structures' of representative government,
old Europe flounders between varieties of dictatorship or
"caesarism" and the. threa~ of revolutions that, for their
part, offer no solutions,.capable of substantially modifying
the course of history.
The subject of legitimacy marks our century, especially
after the First World War. Foretold.in the works of SaintSimon, the theory of political class and elites is essentially
87
�an inheritance from the nineteenth century. New subjects
for political thought introduce the 'new century: the new
feudalism, representation, legitimacy, consent. To give
these subjects-whose pertinency is now unmistakabletheir full weight was one of Ferrero's great intuitions.
LEGITIMACY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
The inspiration of these themes by the struggle with
events tends to confirm that Ferrero did not, as has been
written, come upon the idea of legitimacy in Geneva in
1930 while preparing a course on the French Revolution
and Napoleon, lO but more than ten years earlier, as he says
himself. In Principles of Power, he tells how in 1918 a few
pages ofTalleyrand gave him the key to the understanding
of the history of Europe since the French Revolution:
It took ... a universal catastrophe and a few pages from an
old forgotten book before I became aware of the existence of
the mysterious Genii that were helping and persecuting me
without my knowledge .... The World War was just coming
to an end, and the thrones of Europe were falling one on top
of the other with a deafening clatter. To while away the
hours, I started reading some ancient and forgotten tomes
which were somewhat in the spirit of the times. One day,
while reading Talleyrand's Memoirs, I came across seven
pages in the second volume that revealed to me the principles
oflegitimacy. The revelation was momentous. From then on
I began to see clearly in the history of mankind and in my own
destiny. 11
Legitimacy completed a theory of power that Ferrero
first began to elaborate in the early years of the century.
To undo fear, that primordial condition of human nature,
and to create artificial conditions of stability and security,
man fashions power in the same way he organizes social
life and makes civilization. But power performs its task of
dispelling insecurity only to the extent that it draws upon
an objective idea that legitimates it and lends legality to its
actions. "Power can attain its proper perfection, legitimacy, only through a sort of unwritten contract." This
contract grounds power in the reciprocal promise of the
ruled to obey and the rulers to observe certain rules and
pursue certain ends. In every society legitimacy sanctions
the exercise of power. "As soon as the two parties no
longer respect this contract, the principle of legitimacy
loses its strength. Fear returns." 12 Primordial fear returns-but within society. The ruled fear the force avail·
able to the rulers, the rulers' rebellion, and the frailty of
consent on which they can rely. Power can guarantee "the
rules of the game" of living together only to the extent
that it serves the principles that give a society its direction.
Once the ties of the principles of legitimacy loosen, mistrust invades rulers and ruled: insecurity and fear slowly
88
overcome the human soul. An instrument made to combat
fear, power can incite it, both active and passive, when uit
violates the principle of legitimacy that has up to then jus·
tified it."ll The primordial condition of man, Hobbes's
state of nature, is overcome by the institution and religion
of legitimacy, power. 14 But this religion cannot do without
a rational creed, without rulers with authority and without
the consent of the governed. The principle of legitimacy
ties everything together. It is the actual living constitution
of its group. Power, however, cannot rest on an unequivo-
cal relation between rulers and governed. Like any other
institution, it has to come to terms with the basic contradiction "between human liberty and the social necessity
for reactions that can be foreseen." 15 At the basis of power
there is ambivalence, the same ambivalence that Freud
found in the same years at the foundations of civiliza.
tion, !6 and that the Berlin sociologist, Georg Simmel,
thinks accompanies all subordinationP
The principles of legitimacy attenuate this ambiva·
lence. Because they objectify the idea that endows the organization of society from below and above with meaning,
they serve to preserve subordination from abuse. Govern·
ment and the governed both submit to the idea that underlies the institution. From this idea all members of the
group draw the assurance of the obiectivity of the exercise
of power, which is intimately connected to the idea of legitimacy. Ferrero spoke of "the invisible genii of the city."
Again we are surprised by an analogy with Georg Simmel,
who speaks of the "characteristic and deeply rooted capac·
ity of both individuals and groups to draw new strength
from things whose energy stems from them." The ancient
Greeks, says Simmel, created gods "by sublimating their
own qualities" and then expected the gods to give them a
morality and the strength to practice it.lB
Ferrero's principles of legitimacy are modern gods that
men fashion then to draw from them the rules of political
conduct. These gods must remain inviolate in their sanctuaries, because, "every true authority is divine, and no
material force can violate it." 19 uMen will never acknowl-
edge other men's right to command them unless by a feeling of mystical origin which the intellect cannot explain .... A secular state is an impossible contradiction,
and the authority of the state, like that of a father or
mother, is either by nature hieratic, even when stripped of
rites, or apocryphaJ."20 Men's readiness to hold the principles of legitimacy sacred accounts for the religious dimension in politics. The religious dimension comes not only
because politics was born in temples. It inheres in the nature of political things. 21
Because of this religious dimension, the principles of legitimacy make up the actual living constitution in its organization of a group of men from above and below. They
justify power, the power to command and to rule. "Of all
the inequalities among men none has such telling conse·
quences and, therefore, such a need for justification as the
inequality that comes of power. With rare exceptions one
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�man is as good as another. Why should, one have the right
to command and the rest the duty to obey? The answer
lies in the principles of legitimacy!' 22 They make possible
"tacit agreement between rulers and ruled about the specific laws and rules that determine the conferment and
limits of power." This implicit understanding frees government "from the fear of revolt ever present in the enforced obedience of its subjects." And the subjects no
longer "fear and distrust power." 23 Legitimacy becomes a
complex mechanism which includes a choice of purposes
that must win the assent of all; means of achieving them,
clearly identifiable in institutions; a set of capable men, a
political class, with an effective, and not only formal, mandate to represent the people.
This complex picture of political realities shows the
great intuitive understanding and relevance of Ferrero's
contribution to political thought. Power amounts no
longer to the power of the elitists, to a simple matter of
fact that an organized minority conquers and wields. The
problem of power is intimately tied to legitimacy. Power
must be understood as a circular process. Through consent,24 identification, and representation, 25}egitimacy rises
from below, while power comes down from above in the
actions of the political class that exercises it.26 A more
complex conception has overcome the one-sided vision of
the elitists. The principles of legitimacy work as the invisible "genii of the city."
Through the principles of legitimacy the prevailing
needs of society find realization in an idea that underlies
the formation and guides the actions of a group. This idea
makes up, to speak in juridical terms, the actual constitution of every organization 27 It balances the force available
to the government, which achieves its objectivity through
this idea, and the consent that rises from below. With the
disappearance of this idea consent breaks up and the force
power exercises grows more pronounced and subjective in
its exercise. Mistrust and fear increase. jjNo government
can endure if it is not upheld by a certain force. But woe to
the government that wants to do and command too much!
Some force is necessary, too much is harmful. A government needs authority, prestige, respect. A government
can never have too much authority. The state is authority,
not force." 28 "The principles oflegitimacy have the task of
freeing rulers and ruled from their mutual fears. They increasingly substitute consent for coercion in their relation.
They are, therefore, the pillars of civilization. For men's
effort to free themselves from the fears that torment them
is civilization." 29
The elitists had, however, taught Ferrero that political
conflict cannot be reduced to a conflict of principles:
No principle of legitimacy can thrust itself upon a nation
solely by its own power; in the beginning every principle is
imposed by an organized minority that attempts to overcome
the repugnance and incomprehension of those who are
bound to obey 30
THE ST, JOHNS REVIEW
The time described in these lines is the time of the rise
of a new principle, the phase of prelegitimacy. For principles oflegitimacy "are born, grow, age and die. Sometimes
they differ and collide. Their life cycles and their struggles
make up the invisible web of history."l 1 Prelegitimacy involves the minority that assumes the role of introducing
the new principles. Legitimacy, in contrast, implies all the
forces at work in the political sphere, above all majority
and opposition. The opposition cannot be suppressed
without damage. "Whatever the nature of the suffrage by
which sovereign people express themselves ... , it is obvious that its will cannot be identified with either the will of
the majority or with the will of the minority, that each is a
different section of the unique sovereign will and that the
latter is to be found in the juxtaposition of the two willsmajority and minority. It is therefore impossible to suppress the will of either one without mutilating the sovereign will and drying up the source of legitimacy." 32 In a
system of solid political liberties the opposition must be
free to perform its task. "For the minority to be able to
offer a serious and fruitful opposition it requires a firmly
established system ... so that the will of the people may
not be falsified by coercion, intimidation, or corruption.
But a false majority, which would only be a disguised minority, would always be too frightened of the opposition to
allow it to make loyal use of the political freedom it needs,
or to respect the freedom of suffrage sincerely." 33 Such
conditions of "false majority" foreshadow a crisis oflegitimacy, the outbreak of force and fear on the political stage.
Anarchy spreads. And power threatened threatens in return even to the point of a recourse to a "policy of assassination," a policy that begins in the modern world with the
rise of Napoleon.l4 The break-up of legitimacy means
a return to the original condition of insecurity and precariousness. The mechanisms of defense and aggression that
men had thought laid aside forever come to life again, now
magnified by power. A power that feels threatened and attacks nascent rebellion, and, thereby, excites new and
fiercer violence.
That political struggle cannot be understood entirely in
terms of principles of legitimacy does not mean that Ferrero considers principles oflegitimacy instruments of justification in the hands of the minority that holds power.
This refusal to reduce principles of legitimacy to mere instruments of justification, distinguishes Ferrero's princi~
pies of legitimacy from the political formula of Gaetano
Mosca, at least in its early elaborations.* The principle of
legitimacy also includes the political formula but is not
equivalent to it. The two expressions, legitimacy and polit*In the last chapter of Storia delle dottrine politiche, Bari 1933, Mosca
describes the political formula (the entire chapter is translated in J. H.
Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1958, 382-391):
One of the first results of the new method was the notion of what,
since 1883, has been known as the political formula, meaning that in all
societies, be their level ever so mediocre, the ruling class will justify its
89
�ical formula are, in fact, only in appearance similar.l5 Like
power, the political formula comes' from above. The prin·
ciple of legitimacy, however, involyes all participants in
the political process, for it provides the basis for the tacit
contract that institutes rule. The difference between legitimacy and the political formula may be subtle. In my judgment, 'however, it shows the difference in perspective
from which Mosca and Ferrero viewed the role of legitimacy in the dynamics of politics. Upon the reading of the
just published second edition of Elementi di scienza Politica in 1923, Ferrero wrote Mosca in a letter already
quoted in part:
It seems to me that you still don't give sufficient impor-
tance to what you call the political formula and I call the principle of legitimacy of governments. You seem still to consider
it a sort of pia fraus or conventional lie, useful for justifying
governmental power, above all in the eyes of the ignorant
masses. I am increasingly persuaded that it is the essential
part of government and that force is only a subordinate element, which has no true efficacy unless it is based on the first.
A government is not the real thing unless it has persuaded all
those who obey it that it has a right to command.36
As I remarked at the beginning, legitimacy had contemporary relevance for Ferrero. Ferrero wanted to understand the political crisis of his own times. He concluded
that absence or insufficiency of a principle of legitimacy
had allowed the history of modern Europe continually to
oscillate between varieties of dictatorships or Caesarism
that surreptitiously seek to restore the old principles of legitimacy and revolutions that vainly try to impose with
force new principles of legitimacy that have no place in a
quantitative civilization. The democratic principle based
on universal suffrage is too frail to sustain rule. It comes
down to number simply, to an electoral machine. It has
lost all metaphysical and moral significance.J7 It has corrupted representation. For the most part, it came from
above: "Universal suffrage was everywhere thrust upon
the masses by a minority recruited from the upper class
and supported by a few popular groups. It came from
above exactly like monarchic power. And it descended
from above because the government, after admitting that
the will of the people was alone or in part the source of
legitimate authority, was unable to stop in midstride for
power by appealing to some sentiment or credence generally accepted in
that period and by that society, such as the presumed Popular or Divine
Will, the notion of a distinct nationality or Chosen People, traditional
loyalty toward a dynasty, or confidence in a man of exceptional qualities.
Of course, every political formula must reflect the specific intellectual
and moral maturity of the people and the epoch in which it is adopted. It
must closely correspond to the particular conception of the world prevailing at that time in that particular society, in order to cement the moral
unity of all the individuals who compose it.
Any indication that a political formula has become "dated," that the
faith in its principles has become shaky, that the ardent sentiments
which once inspired it have begun to cool down is a sign that serious
transformations of the ruling class are imminent.
90
very long at arbitrary distinctions that restricted sovereign
rights to a part of the nation. The people means everyone.
A simple irresistible solution." 38 Universal suffrage also
failed to endow the collectivity with the mystery of value.
The consequences were profound: "the collapse of all
authority":
The ruin of all principles of authority in which Western civilisation believed is the greatest destruction caused by the
war. . . . All authority has collapsed. Sheer force rules the
world, force alone, stark naked, or covered up with red rags or
the torn shred of a national flag. Force governs as best it can,
with excesses and sudden starts, without discernment. It tears
the world apart. For force is so weak when it is naked and
alone. 39
With the collapse of all authority after the First World
War, Europe on the one hand entrusted itself to the myth
of "regenerative violence" that has not and never will prevail and which has only spawned various madness:
The Revolution has not won and could not win because it did
not give birth to a new principle of authority. Universal suffrage is not a principle of authority, but an electoral machine
for collecting votes and putting together assemblies, large and
small. When has the world ever been governed by a machine?
A government is eyes, arms, brains, thought, and will. A machine is a piece of blind inanimate matter, moved by external
force. 40
On the other hand, everyone in Europe called loudly for a
"strong government". But governments of that time were
a strange mixture of strength and weakness, "immense
force bolstered by tottering authority."41 All this resulted
in a series of dictatorships that could not justify their
power and sought to revive as much as possible the old
monarchial power42 Dictatorships and revolutions appealed to each other and justified each other in a vicious
cycle that kept out the crucial problem: the not merely formal, but the actual legitimacy of power. After 1930, Ferrero wrote, "The confusion becomes general. We must go
to the bottom of the problem; distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governments by means of definitions that go to the root of the problem; study intermediate forms and drive out the mental chaos of our wandering
by the effort to understand it."43
What did Ferrero think would become of the principle
of legitimacy? Its future depended on overcoming this period of transition in which men believed they could build a
civilization solely on quantity. "The world," Ferrero said
to Bogdan Raditsa in 1939,
will not recover order, peace, and freedom to live and think
until the day it rediscovers the eternal ~rinciples of any civilisation: quality, limits, and legitimacy. 4
Mankind, or at any rate its elite, now faces a decisive turning
point: it has become too well informed, too sure of itself, too
skeptical to believe in a principle of legitimacy as a religious
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�absolute without wanting to know why. It wants to reason
everything out, even principles of legitimacy. Therefore it
must not remain content to reason only to the point where
every principle of legitimacy appears a'!:>surd or unjust. It
must go beyond that to the very bottom of the problem. It
must discover the nature and the task of principles of legitimacy, so that from them it may deduce rules for a rational
ethics of authority that will transform the former mystical
veneration of government into a widespread knowledge and
sentiment of respective duties: those of the government toward its subjects and those of the subjects toward the government. There is no other solution. The problem of government today looms before the West like an enormous and
precipitous mountain, full of crevasses, glaciers, and ava-
lanches, that bars the path to all mankind.45
An Augustus who could restore the state "beginning at the
beginning with the legitimacy of the government" is called
for-not a Caesar. "We shall sink deeper and deeper into
disorder until we constitute a government whose credentials are in order, whose legitimacy, or right to govern, is
unarguable before the conscience of the nation". 46
INTUITION AND LIMITATIONS IN
FERRERO'S THINKING
Ferrero's identification of several crucial elements in
the crisis in the relation of individual to society brings his
work close to us. In the context of individual and society,
the problem of legitimacy is not only a political but also a
social problem. Social life is founded on dimensions at the
same time objective and subjective. The principles of legitimacy, in Ferrero's meaning, make sense just because
they at the same time embody the objective dimension of
collective life and the subjective assent to it through identification with the institutions that carry out the principles
of legitimacy.
Principles of!egitimacy can only rise from a balance between the objective and subjective dimensions of life. But
Ferrero deals with the sames problems that Simmel
treated in his analysis of the money economy, that Max
Weber saw in terms of formal rationality, that Freud described as civilization's discontent. 48 But Ferrero concentrates his attention chiefly on the political consequences
of the crisis in legitimacy-and on the succession and alternation of varieties of anarchy and totalitarianism that
justify and reinforce each other.
The end result of doctrines that promised men liberty,
equality, and fraternity, Ferrero wrote to Mosca in 1920,
has been the coming of governments "harder and more
violent, because stronger but less authoritative ... that today are all turning into tyrannies based on money and
force .... As for the rebirth of the principle of authority, I
believe that it is inevitable but that it will come about
slowly, in a distant future. We shall not live to see it. Probably the new principle of authority will take shape around
persons, institutions, and doctrines that will defend men
against this dreadful tyranny."49
Ferrero did not mean to write political theory. From the
point of view of theory, there are, in fact, many things to
criticize: his too formalistic and sometimes too abstract exposition of legitimacy that is more bound to principles
and, therefore, to the images of legitimacy, than to the
mechanisms of consent and of identification that bring legitimacy; the consequent impression of neglect of daily realities, of the relations and interaction of social life that
produce power and legitimation; and finally his recourse
to language that too often resorts to emotion rather than
proof.
Ferrero has, however, at least two great merits. He went
beyond the power theory of the elitists. And with the theory of legitimacy he made a notable advance on the theory
of ideology and upon Mosca's political formula. Many of
Ferrero's books and many of his views show the marks of
time. I believe, however, that these two themes could provide the beginning of a new chapter in political analysis. In
Italy, Ferrero wrote, at least, the introductory paragraph of
that chapter.
Translated by Frances Frenaye
modern culture, in Ferrero's view, founded on quantity,
on the increase of numbers, on progress defined in terms
of production, on a money economy, has provoked a crisis
in the subjective dimension of social life. Faced with the
increase of complexity and at the same time with the
fragmentation of social life, with role conflicts and manifold expectations that sweep him up, the individual, as
Simmel observed, defends himself with indifference and
gives up identifications that might disturb the unity of his
mental life. 47 The impossibility of striking a balance between the objective and subjective dimensions of life is
the crisis in legitimacy. It was in its capacity to balance between subjective and objective life that Ferrero found the
"religious" implication of the principles of legitimacy.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
l. Later reprinted in Gaetano Mosca, Partiti e sinddcati nella crisi del regime parlamentare, Bari 1949.
2. Vilfredo Pareto, Trasformazione della democrazia, Milano 1921.
3. Bogdan Raditsa, Colloqui con Guglielmo Ferrero, Lugano 1939, 63.
4. Ferrero came to Taine through Cesare Lombroso, who also considered him one of his teachers. His way of conceiving and approaching history is certainly very similar to Taine's. Both men had the idea of studying the past in order to understand the reasons for a contemporary crisis,
whether in France after 1870 or in Italy at the turn of the century. It may
well be that Ferrero's sensitivity to the problem of the legitimacy of
power came also from Taine. For the relationship of Taine, Lombroso,
and Ferrero, see M. Simonetti, "Georges Sorel e Guglielmo Ferrero fra
"cesarismo" borghese e socialismo" (with 27 unpublished letters from
Sorel to Ferrero 1896~1921), Il Pensiero Politico, 5, l. On Taine, C.
Mongardini, Storia e sociologia nell'operra di H. Taine, Milan 1965.
91
�5. Guglielmo Ferrero, Lavecchia Europa e_ Ia nuova. Saggi e discorsi, Mi·
lan 1918, 36.
•
6. Guglielmo Ferrero, Storia e filosofia della storia, Nuova Antologia, November 1, 1910. Reprinted in B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 100.
7. B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 63-64~
8. Cf. C. Mongardini, Profili della sociologia italianc1, Rome 1982.
9. C. Mongardini ed., Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Ferrero. Carteggio
(1896-1934), Milan 1980, 331. A translation of the entire letter of May 5,
1923, appears in "Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue of the St. John's
Review.
10. Cf. N. Bobbio, "II potere e il diritto," Nuovo Antologia, Aprill982.
The exact date is important. Because if we date the idea from the course
given in Geneva in 1930, we must recall that Max Weber's Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft, posthumously published in 1921, contains a famous characterization of the forms oflegitimate power. Actually, Ferrero had amply
developed his idea of legitimacy in Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano
<kposto, Milan 1920.
11. G. Ferrero, Principles of Power, New York 1942, 18-19. This book
first appeared in an edition (published by Brentano's) in French, the Ian·
guage of its writing, in New York in 1942.
12. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 42.
13. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 42.
14. There are, however, important "differences between Ferrero and
Hobbes, Cf. D. Settembrini, "Riscopriamo Guglielmo Ferrero," Tempo
Presente, June 1982.
15. G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe, New York 1941, 32.
16. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, first published in
German at the end of 1929.
17. Georg Simmel, "Ober und Unterordnung" in Soziologie, Untersu·
chungen iiber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Berlin 1908. Translation
in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt H.
Wolff, New York 1950, 181-306, 193:
Man has an intimate dual relation to the principle of subordination.
On the one hand, he wants to be dominated. The majority of men not
only cannot exist without leadership; they also feel that they cannot;
they seek the higher power which relieves them of responsibility; they
seek a restrictive, regulatory rigor which protects them not only
against the outside world but also against themselves. But no less do
they need opposition to the leading power, which only through this
opposition, through move and countermove, as it were, attains the
right place in the life pattern of those who obey it.
18. Cf. G. Simmel, "Comment les formes sociales se maintiennent,"
L'annee sociologique, 1897. Also, in a later, longer draft, "Die Selbsterhaltung der sozialen Gruppe" in Soziologie, Untersuchungen tiber die
Formen der Vergesellschaftung, 3 Leipzig 1923, 375-459. English translation of the earlier draft, "The Persistence of Social Groups," American
Journal of Sociology 5, March 1898, 662-698; 6, May 1898, 829-836; 4,
july 1898, 35-50.
19. G. Ferrero, Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto, Milan 1920.
On the nature of principles of legitimacy, cf. also, L. Pellicani, "Rivoluzione e totalitarismo," Controcorrente, October-December 1974.
20. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 280. Because of their sacred char·
acter all principles of legitimacy, even originally partly rational, "can be·
come absurd in their application." The rational element in principles of
legitimacy "is accidental, external and unsubstantial" (G. Ferrero, Power,
New York 1942, 25). Moreoever, the rationality of a principle of legiti·
macy remains internal to the principle itself (117).
21. Cf. Georges Burdeau, La politique au pays des merveilles, Paris 1979,
6 ff.
92
22. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942,22-23.
23. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942,281.
24. Ferrero showed unusual foresight in distinguishing between types of
consent, especially between active and passive content. For instance,
Power, New York 1942,40-41,278,293. On types of consent, C. Mongar·
dini, Le condizioni del consenso, Rome 1980.
25. Political representation is, in Ferrero, the "supporting structure of
the democratic system" but it does not imply a close relationship between representatives and represented. The relationship passes through
the principles of legitimacy just as every action of the government
passes through them. Cf. Pier Paolo Portinaro, "Democrazia e dittatura
in Guglielmo Ferrero," Comunitd, 33, 181, October 1979.
26. Power, New York 1942, 171.
·
27. Ferrero's recall in Power (132) of Hans Kelsen, "one of the greatest
exponents of constitutional and international law of our time," is not ac·
cidental. A little further on (143-144), he seems to subtly argue with him:
Efficacy has a role in the eternal drama of legitimacy, but a different
role from that assigned to it by contemporary thought. Though attached to it, legitimacy never depends directly on the efficacy of gov·
emment, which may increase or diminish over a long period of time
without affecting legitimacy.
28. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 292-293.
29. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 48.
30. Power, 169.
31. Power, 49.
32. Power, 173-174.
33. Power, 175.
34. Power, 201-203.
35. N. Bobbio ("II potere e il diritto," Nuova Antologia, April 1982)
seems, instead, to lend them the same meaning.
36. See the discussions between Mosca and Ferrero on "political for·
mula" and "principles oflegitimacy" in Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Fer·
rero. Carteggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980, 330-332 and 453-55. Transla·
tions of both these letters (May 6, 1923 and February 17, 1934) appear in
"Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue of the St. John's Review.
37. G. Ferrero, Power, 53.
38. Power, 182-183.
39. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 289 and 295.
40. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 285-286.
41. G. Ferrero, Words to the Deaf, New York 1925, 71.
42. G. Ferrero, "Reflexions sur une agonie," L'illustration, April 21,
1928.
43. G. Ferrero, Power, 130.
44. B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 83.
45. Power, 283-284.
46. G. Ferrero, La democrazia in Italia. Studi e precisioni, Milan 1925,
107.
47. G. Simmel, "Die Grossstadte und das Geistesleben" in Die Grasstadt, Dresden 1903, 185-206. English translation, "The Metropolis and
Mental Life," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York 1950, 409424.
48. Ferrero uses the concept of identification in much the same way as
Freud, and gives it much the same importance in the interpretation of
modem society. Cf. G. Ferrero, Power, 35-36,48. For Freud, Civilization
and its Discontents (1929).
49. Mosca-Ferrero. Carteggio, Milan 1980, 295-297. A translation of this
letter of January 31, 1920 appears in "Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue
of the St. John's Review.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�My Memoir of Our Revolution
from City of Ends
Daniel Ardrey
That morning his picture appeared on the wall-and on
all the walls all over the city. I saw from my window a small
crowd looking up at it-! went down to look myself. We
studied it in silence. He was a handsome man-no doubt
about it-and fair with his blond hair combed back en
brosse. Though the picture was a grainy black and white
snapshot you could see his eyes were blue-either that or
pale brown. Written beneath it were simple wordsBROTHERS AND SISTERS
UNITE
FOR
VICTORY
AND
THE
REvOLUTION!
They sent a shiver through us like a small shock-it was
the first time he was to speak to us and we weren't used to it
yet. Nor were we used to reading: our lips moved as we
read and our heads jerked on from word to word. As we
stood there looking up we all knew that this was our expec·
tation and our fulfillment. I looked around and saw tears in
some of the women's eyes-Marissa was there and snif·
fling into a much worn hankerchief. My reaction was one
of enormous relief as though a huge burden had been
lifted from my shoulders. My back straightened involun-
Daniel Ardrey lives in Boston.
The above selection comes from an unpublished novel, City of Ends.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tarily and I raised my chin. Marissa came over to me-her
eyes were reddened.
Isn't it too wonderful?
she asked.
Yes, it is
I answered-it was trueIt's what we all hoped for.
I patted her on the shoulder-! wanted to console her
though there was nothing to be sad about. His picture
alone had given us new meaning.
The rest of the day I saw small groups of people clustered in front of it speculating.
What's he like? Will we ever see him? Where' s he
from? Look at those eyes. And the chin. And the
hair. What'll he do?
And so on. The kinds of questions people asked to flesh
out their initial excitement. Because above all we wanted
to think of him as a man. There was something about his
face-perhaps the jutting of his chin, perhaps his piercing
eyes-that inspired confidence and respect. And, of
course, we saw him as the personification of our Revolution. From now on it was going to cease to be amorphous
and confusing. We were like those wakened from a deep
and troubled sleep-to see in his face that which we'd
dreamt and forgotten, or never known. I went about my
business as usual-though nothing was as usual then. It
was before and after, light and dark-a total change and so
clearly defined. If our Revolution was to have a human
face, his, it was also going to take on a personality, also his.
That would make it so much easier to understand, I
thought-no longer were we going to be perplexed and
baffled and because of it always afraid. No, this was itand the act of reading his words gave me a feeling of intimate relation to him. Although he was addressing us as
brothers and sisters we couldn't be that-we would have
to be children and led. Not that we'd mind-it was only
93
�logical. The Revolution had made us all children anyway.
Though some of us were older than others, the Revolution
had led us into a world that was fresh and clean and beautiful-like a child's. There was also the unknown-so much
of it I couldn't say-that's where he came in. Like a father
he'd tell us what was and what wasn't. That is to say, define our beliefs and behavior. We all had a sense of this-in
some way or another-and if we were discussing the color
of his eyes or hair we were also thinking of these other
things.
I went about my business humming, arranging things on
my shelves. The shutter to my shop was half up and while
my back was turned Roderigo came in. I heard his voice
behind me and knew who it was.
Well, what do you think?
What?
Is he for real? Or is it a plot? Somebody out to get
us.
I was so startled I dropped what I had in my hand. I had to
bend down to pick it up before I turned to him. I saw he
was serious.
How can you think that?
I said.
It wouldn't make sense.
Maybe not. Or maybe not now, maybe later.
Roderigo shrugged with his face, his shoulders didn't
move, and sat down on an orange crate. He took a toothpick from his coat pocket and began to pick at his teeth.
We'd be fools to fall for it if it weren't for real,
wouldn't we?
he went on.
I suppose so,
I said. I sat down on something and scratched the side of
my forehead-it was to give me time to think. He was
studying me with great care.
You know,
he beganWe all think we're so clever. I mean that we know
how to get by. And we do. Look at us.
He moved his hand palm upward in a half circle.
But what else do we know?
Pause. He answered his own question.
Not much, maybe nothing. We don't have the
faintest idea what we're getting into, do we?
Maybe not,
I said thinking how best to phrase itBut everyone was thinking the same thing at the
same time. It was like we all knew what was going
to happen and didn't know what it was.
My turn to pause.
That means something, you can't deny it.
I don't.
He took the toothpick and balanced it on his forefinger.
He studied it for a momentIt's his face that frightens me. Maybe any face
would, but this one more than most.
94
I don't feel it,
I said-
Nobody else did, you'll get used to it. Maybe you'll
even trust him.
Maybe.
He wiped the toothpick on his sleeve and put it back in his
pocket. It was going to be one of those conversations without an end. He got up, looked over my shelves and
shrugged-this time with his shoulders and not his face.
Then he went out without a word. Roderigo was one of
those people who made you feel like you'd made another
mistake-and that you'd go on making them. Usually he
did it with a laugh-this time he didn't. I didn't care. It was
his problem, not mine. I never like to convince someone of
anything-my convictions were for myself. I didn't even
think much about them. I thought that I was born with
them. And that we all were. I believed that the Revolution
was a victory for all of us-whether or not we believed
in it.
It was the kind of day I kept trying to remember something I wasn't trying to forget. All day it was there. Like a
little particle of sand irritating the tissue around it. By the
time I lay down and fell asleep I'd been exhilarated so long
I was exhausted. It was then I realized-almost dreaming
it -that it was in fact the Anniversary of our Revolution.
How amazing he should've appeared then!
His name was Kamal. It was one of many things we were
soon to find out about him. After the first wall poster there
were many others-each one with his picture at the top
like an emblem. Or like his signature-in this case its position reversed-as if he'd signed his statement at the beginning to ensure its authenticity. That way we were to know
what followed was genuine and to be believed in. Each
morning I looked down at the wall from my window-the
shutters now left open day and night-and saw there was
another poster up. I threw on my clothes and raced downstairs. Others on the street did likewise-some of us stood
still buttoning our shirts or still combing our hair. We soon
got better at reading-our lips moved less-though there
was still a murmuring as we read. It was communal: we did
it together and enjoyed it. We didn't even notice that for
the first time we were together and that it was through and
because of him.
He told us a great deal about himself-his life history as
it were-but always in passing. His main subject was-as it
had to be-the Revolution. But we knew about that-or
thought we did-so it was him we were curious about. He
seemed to realize this. At the end of a short textWINTER/SPRING 1983
�THE REVOLUTION MUST GO ON, DO NOT
BETRAY IT, YOU ARE THE BYES AND
EARS, BEUEVE IN THE REVOLUTION AND
IT WILL BEUEVE IN YOU
and so on-were a few lines about himself. It was these we
read and reread until each of us knew his life history by
heart. His poor parents and their harassment by the tax
collectors of the Old Regime. How his brother had died as
a child from starvation. How his mother had wept and carried the body for days even though it was lifeless. How his
father had worked twelve and fourteen and sixteen hours a
day for a pittance. How he-Kamal-had had to work as
hard as a child-and how he'd begun to read. His reading
fascinated us-we did little of it ourselves and thought
that a man of action would do likewise. No, in his youth he
was almost scholarly. He'd gone to a seminary, then to a
university on scholarship, and then on to do post graduate
work abroad-all this while he worked nights as a sole support of his family. His father had become a cripple-victimized by a work accident that twisted his back and for
which there was no compensation. His mother had great
difficulty breathing-from the noxious fumes she'd had to
inhale at her factory. It was almost a blessing when she'd
died-for her last years were spent gasping for breath like
a fish out of water. We read in awe of someone who could
transform himself from such a background to a life of
scholarship-and then out of nowhere to become the embodiment of the Revolution.
The wall posters became a vital part of our lives. You
saw parents taking children down to read them-then children saying them to themselves as they walked home. The
wall posters were not easy to read-they were pasted one
on top of the next and the wall itself was often pitted and
cracked to begin with. So reading one wall poster was a
reminder-admittedly subconscious-of all the others you
had read that were under it. In this way, the Revolution
that often seemed to have little or no history began to take
on a collective past for us. There was another problem
with them-their printing. We had little experience of it
and whoever was doing it was learning his craft as he went.
There were differently shaped letters in the same word,
smeared ink that ran in the rain, and lines of printing that
went up to edge of the poster and off it -so between that
and the line below was a gap of meaning our reading had
to leap over. We learned to interpret these signs as we
learned to read-they made the text all the more intriguing. At the bottom of each poster was an imprimatur in
tiny letters-Errico studio, it said. We wondered where
that was-we never knew. What an honor to be the first
among us to read his thoughts-like walking up to him and
shaking his hand.
At this point there were those who had doubts. About
him. About the course of the Revolution itself. As days
went by and summer began I heard more and more people
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
whispering. I thought of Roderigo. I hadn't seen him since
he'd confided in me. I was sure I had doubts myself-to
have seen Kamal in person would've dispelled them for
me. And for most of us. But he didn't appear. We weren't
dealing with an ordinary man. He knew of our doubts as I
was sure he knew of everything in our minds. I always got
the feeling he could read them-the same way we read his
through the wall posters. Before long we read there would
be a sign-one that would show each of us that he was real
and the real extent of his powers.
THERE IS GOOD AND THERE IS EVIL IN
THE WORLD. THE REVOLUTION IS GOOD.
ALL ELSE IS EVIL.
It was simple-we understood.
THERE IS ONE TRUTH AND THAT IS THE
TRUTH OF THE REVOLUTION. IT IS UKE
LIGHT. WITH IT YOU CAN SEE AND WITHOUT IT YOU ARE LOST IN THE DARK.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS, BELIEVE!
We wondered what that sign was going to be. There was all
sorts of speculation. People spoke of a trembling of the
ground or other kinds of apparently natural phenomena.
Perhaps we got a little too metaphysical in our enthusiasm.
When his sign came it was as striking as it was appropriate
and all the more convincing for us.
It was late one evening and I was in my room sitting by
myself in the dark. I heard a scratching at the door. It was
Oggi-who else? He was among the sceptical but I sensed
in him someone waiting to believe. I let him in and he
dropped his weapons in the corner with a clunk. I made
some coffee and we sat sipping it. The windows were open
and there was a pleasant breeze blowing the curtains back
and forth. They brushed against my arm from time to
time-for a moment I thought I'd been touched by some
hands. It sent a sensation through me I wasn't sure of. It
was as we sat there-the two of us not talking-that we
began to see it happening. The city was lighting up. Bit by
bit. The area by the marina went on. Then that near the
National Museum. Then near the foot hills. Oggi and I put
down our mugs as one and stood up to lean out. We still
didn't speak but our shoulders rested against each other.
Then my own room lit up and it became as bright as day.
Brighter. It was blinding. We turned from the window to
try and look. I shielded my eyes. There were flashes that
seemed to go off in my head. I blinked a few times and
began to see. There was a single light bulb hanging from
the ceiling by a cord-l'd long ago forgotten about it. And
there it was on again. I laughed. Spasmodic. Nervousness
mostly. And the expression in Oggi's face was miraculous.
A cross between anger and being hurt. Then amazement.
95
�He went up to the bulb and touched it with his finger. He
jerked it back and brought it to his ,mouth. It was already
too hot. He was shaking his head back and forth. Of course
he knew what it was-we all did-but electricity was so
strange for us. To have been without it for so long and
then to have it again-that was ridiculous. There was a
switch on the wall that'd been there all the time-! went
over to it and moved it down. The bulb went out. I moved
it up and the bulb went on again. Oggi laughed and put
out his finger to touch it-then stopped. He smiled at me
and shook his head. Then he went to the switch and
flicked it back and forth several times. The light went on
and off again. Each time we laughed and louder. And
harder. Soon we were laughing so hard Oggi got the hiccups. I slapped him on the back and he stood hiccuping
and shaking his head.
Unbelievable!
he gaspedUnbelievable!
I couldn't have agreed more though the strange thing was
that we did believe. And we knew we owed it all to Kamal.
That summer was so mild. The breezes came off the sea
and kept the city cool and temperate. It was so pleasurable.
We felt a new and assured sense of security.
It was a time for hard work and no play-Kamal told us so
and we believed.
THE REVOLUTION WANTS YOUR SPIRIT
AND YOUR HANDS
we read-and all of us wanted to join in. Oggi came bythis time his hands were empty and he carried no
weapons.
I buried them,
he answered my inquiring lookI'm not going to be needing them.
And he was gone-in search of a trowel or some digging
implement. Such was our confidence! In ourselves. In Kamal. I walked wherever I pleased and in the middle of the
street. All over I saw groups of children and young
adults-they were picking up bricks, one by one, and setting them in piles. For so long the city had been a place
caught in mid-movement-it was the Revolution that had
stopped it like that. I passed a bank where the construction
looked like it was still going on. The hoists were in place,
mortar had hardened on the trowels, the ladders still led
up from floor to floor. It was these things we thought we
could get going again. Everywhere there were people
96
clearing and scraping and washing off. When I walked past
they looked up and waved-then went back to their work.
There was a sense of camaraderie-to be out and working
together felt so good. Because it was for us-and for him.
I had my problems-that is, my business. There were so
many things I'd saved up that were all of a sudden of no
use-most obviously, candles. I was loathe to throw them
away so I simply stuck them in the back of my shop. You
could never tell, I told myself-how often I'd predicted
one thing only to have another happen. My motto was to
keep it -whatever it was-even if at the time it made no
sense. I had to find new things-and fast-so I was out
looking around the city for one thing in particular. Light
bulbs. I'd had to wade through piles of junk to get my
hands on one of seventy-five or a hundred watts. For me it
was a new technology-to survive I had to adapt to it.
Wherever I found one I unscrewed it from the socket and
wrapped it in tissue paper. Light bulbs were so fragile unlike most of what I carried-candles were a lot easier to
take care of but then no one was going to want them. I
spent my days walking all over the city looking for light
bulbs-and I found them. Where I expected-where
they'd been left-in apartments and offices long since
abandoned. To me they were small and precious and delicate. And it wouldn't be long before everyone else thought
so too. We were so excited by the electricity that we left
our lights burning day and night. You'd see people switching them on and off for the sheer fun of it-like Oggi and
me. When it was dark and I was walking around I could
look in and see the bulbs burning. People were gathered
under them and looking up. No one drew their shades or
closed their shutters-at night we had no sense of our own
exposure. It was still so new to us. But I knew that sooner
or later the bulbs we had were going to go out-and others
would be in demand. I was trying to get my hands on every
last bulb I could find-to be ready for that time.
I had always to be one step ahead-if not I'd never make
it. The Revolution was carrying me and everyone else
along with it-that is, we never knew what was going to
come next. Everything-whether living or not-was part
of it-light bulbs as much as the rest. So meaning was
everywhere. If I had one ability above all it was my apprehension of this. It was easy to see that people were part of
the Revolution-even a child knew that-but many of us
never knew that things were also a part of it. Perhaps what
gave me so much confidence in Kamal was my sense that
he understood this too.
THE REVOLUTION IS IN YOUR HANDS. WASH
THEM! THEY MUST BE CLEAN!
EACH THING YOU TOUCH IS THE REVOLUTION.
IT IS THERE BEFORE YOU. IT IS THERE
AFTER YOU. REMEMBER YOU ARE NEVER
ALONE!
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�The most evident thing about his writings was his fondness for exclamation marks. I'd forgotten at first what they
were for-someone reading a wall poster next to me had
told me. Then I'd understood. How mcire than anything
else they conveyed his sense of urgency and emotion. It
was strange for us to think of him as emotional-the Revolution as we'd understood it had no room for that. It was
Kamal who showed us how mistaken we were. He made it
come to life for us.
THE REVOLUTION IS YOU. IT LIVES IN
YOUR HEART. IT BREATHES AS YOU
BREATHE. BELIEVE IN IT AND YOU WILL
UVE FOREVER!
Perhaps that's why we were no longer afraid of it-to be in
fear of yourself wasn't the same thing as to be in fear of the
unknown. Kamal made the Revolution familiar to us all.
He made us see it was something to feel for and even to
love.
Love wasn't too strong a word. We had no word that
meant the same thing all the time-or even for very long.
Love came closest to that. It wasn't a word I'd have used
for someone else-not for Oggi, much as I cared for him.
Nor for my mother, though you were supposed to love
your mother. She had made that relationship one that
couldn't be expressed by a word. The Revolution was different-it was in direct contact with each of us. It was Kamal who showed us what that meant.
LOVE THE REVOLUTION AND IT WILL LOVE
YOU BACK!
To us it was true and like so many things he showed us we
saw it as if for the first time. I always thought he could read
our minds but was more than that, he knew what we were
going to think before we thought it. In that sense all time
was present to him at all times-while we kept living our
day to day lives. When we read
THE REVOLUTION MAKES YOU JOYOUS
TODAY. YOU WILL BE SADDENED TOMORROW.
it was so. The next day our mood changed. We were subdued-some of us cried. I was ashamed of myself. Marissa
came by. I gave her what she wanted and asked for nothing
in return. She was part of us and understood. Her eyes
were wet and she reached up and touched me on the
cheek. Then shook her head.
I don't know
she said! don't know. I feel sort of sick like something's
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
gone out of me. I've lost something and I don't
know what.
I felt that way. I didn't say it. I helped her out of my shop
and down the street. I felt saddened by the rocking of her
limp against me. That mood didn't last.
THE REVOLUTION IS PEACE. PEACE BEYOND WORDS. As THE REVOLUTION IS
BEYOND WORDS. PEACE BE WITH YOU!
We felt better. There was Kamal again-penetrating into
each of our hearts and minds. Holding us. Gentle. Reassuring. For Oggi-for me-for everyone-he was more than a
father. He was fatherhood, too. Imagine-then-what it
was like to hear his voice for the first time!
It was late summer-hot, not unbearable. I sat in my
room wondering what to do next. I'd sold all my light
bulbs. They'd gone in a flash when their true value became apparent. Once the old light bulbs had all gone out.
There were no more to be had. I'd gone through more
piles of junk looking for them-no luck, they weren't
there. Much to my amazement I'd begun to start selling
candles again. That's what I meant about my business being unpredictable. Now the problem was what I was going
to live on next. That's what I was thinking about when I
heard it. A rumbling. Like distant thunder. I brushed the
curtains aside-there were no clouds. I listened some
more. It was continuous. I went down into the street. Everyone else was there-including Roderigo and Old Jubal.
I hadn't seen either in a long time. Roderigo winked at me.
Old Jubal adjusted his canes and waved with one handthe same gesture as if he'd opened a door. The rumbling
was there and getting louder. All of us were looking up at
it. There was a small black box-some form of loud
speaker, I supposed-affixed high up on a building. The
rumbling was coming from it-not continuous as I'd first
thought. Spaced. In a monotone.
OmOmOm
Pause
OmOmOm
Pause again.
Om Om Om
I felt like I was looking into something-there was movement and getting closer. My head began to ache some.
Then a crackle. High pitched. So piercing our first reflex
was to clap our hands over our ears-the crackle came
through them-through flesh as through stone. So when
97
�the voice began there was relief and a collective sigh. For a
few moments our ears kept ringing. I wasn't sure what I
heard. The words seemed to have echoes to them. It was a
man's voice-curiously shrill and feminine and sounding
none too cheerful. It took us a while to figure out whose it
was-though there was no one else's it could've been. I
was standing behind Old Jubal and saw him stroking the
grey stubble on his chin. Then his hand came out to mehis canes moved and he came closer.
It's him
he whispered. I didn't hear him. I was straining to hear the
voice from the black box.
It's him! Kamal!
This time I heard. There was a rustling among usRoderigo was nodding his head beside me. I realized it
too-how strange! We hadn't thought of him having a
voice-much less a voice like this one. It was so unpleas·
ant-like a querulous school teacher we'd long ago forgotten. Then there it was again. We were face to face with
it-and with him. Kamal. A real person, voice and all,
when we'd gotten used to him as a manifesto on a wall.
He knew this. He was still reading our minds:
Some of you may not like my voice, I don't like it
either. In fact, I don't think of it as my voice. It's
too harsh. It's not how I think of myself. It hap·
pened to me under torture. It was the torturers of
the Old Regime, they did it to me. You don't
know what it is, torture. I hope you never find out.
It destroys your body and your mind, one through
the other. The people who do this to other people
are no longer people.
Pause. There was some static. Kamal went on.
I lived through it somehow. You can if you believe
each day is your last, if you're willing to give it up,
all of it. I was. I didn't know what this meant. You
can't know while it happens to you, no one can.
Afterwards my voice was never the same.
Another pause. None of us moved. We stood with our eyes
fixed on the black box.
It took me a long time to get used to it. I'd stand in
front of a mirror and practice saying words. None
of them sounded right to me. I hated them. I
hated those who'd done this to me. Then one day
I realized something. I don't know how we find
out such things, they come to us from elsewhere,
as though there is another presence in us at that
time. What had happened was that my voice was
no longer mine alone. It was mine and that of the
Revolution. The Revolution was going to speak
through me. It was the pain and screaming that
took my own voice from me. It was the Revolution
that gave it back to me with a meaning. That is
why I wanted you to hear me. Some of you will be
disappointed. Then you will hear me again and
again. You won't notice it any more. It'll be the
most natural thing in the world. Like your own
98
voices that you hear every day. Because it is not
me you are listening but yourselves. There is one
voice for all of us. I listen. I look. I can even look
· into you. I know what it is you need, I know you as
I know myself. We are all children of the Revolution. That is why we are brothers and sisters. It is
the Revolution that gives life, life and meaning. It
is as close to truth as we can get. Without it we are
lost. So I say to you, believe in the Revolution, believe in its truth. If anyone tells you otherwise,
they lie.
There was the crackle again. Then
OmOmOm
and silence. It hung in the air around us. We were stunned
and didn't move. I wanted to cry like a little boy. I felt Old
Jubal reach out and touch me. I looked down at him. His
whole face was shades of grey, his skin, his stubble, his
hair. It was his eyes that were so striking-they too were
grey and flecked with something that sometimes shone.
Like now.
Well, my friend, we've heard him
he whispered
Let's go home.
I didn't know where his was or if he had one-I assumed
he meant mine. He got his canes moving and we moved
off-! was behind him. I didn't want to go-I felt I was
tearing myself away. There was something about the place
where I'd stood as I listened. There was something about
his voice. It was hard to get used to and hard to forget. It
was from then that we truly began to believe in Kamal. I
supposed it was because his voice was so unexpected. It
was the unexpected in the Revolution that always convinced us because it had no precedent.
What do you think of him?
I meant Kamal. This time I saw his head shift and even in
the dark I saw a kind of sparkle in his grey eyes.
We need him
Old Jubal saidWe need him as much as he needs us. Without us
he's nothing. And he knows it.
That was his answer-all of it. I waited for more-there
wasn't any. Old Jubal was that way-cryptic-enigmaticsometimes illusive. Questions weren't much help-he
talked about what he wanted to talk about. Often his
dreamsThey are as life
he saidOnly more so.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�I didn't know much about dreams-I 4sually couldn't tell
if I had any. Old Jubal said he remembered each one.
I had five last night
he went on.
Let me tell you some, my friend. In one I was a
little boy again with my feet. I was playing football. Dribbling. I must've been a center forward. I
was dribbling back and forth from one goal to the
other. No one could catch me. The players on
both teams tried to catch me. They couldn't.
They couldn't get near the ball. I kept it. It danced
from my feet as through on a string. Then they
got me cornered. All of them. Like dogs. I began
bouncing it on my head. They were jumping up
and down around me trying to get it. They wanted
to reach out and grab it with their hands. They
couldn't, they couldn't touch it.
He paused.
My friend, I am always afraid. You should be too.
I shrugged. I wasn't-for the time being.
Not now
I said.
You should be, you must be.
He answered.
The Revolution needs people. It feeds on them. I
go all over. I see things other people don't see.
There are so many parts of the city, large parts,
with no one there. I ask myself where they are.
Can you tell me where they are, my friend?
I didn't know-! didn't say.
I'll tell you. They've been eaten!
What? Eaten? Ridiculous! How? Why?
He was thinking. I was too. What did he mean? I couldn't
say it was nonsense-Old Jubal wasn't like that-! had to
figure out what he meant. It was dark now. The candle
flickered and went out. There was a faint glow from the
city's lights-whitish. The stars again looked brighter now
that the lights were less.
It's simple. You won't like it, my friend. The Revo·
lution is hungry all the time, starving. It doesn't
like dogs and cats. If it did there aren't enough of
them anyway. And they're scrawny. So what's it
going to live off? The answer's obvious.
Pause.
Us! Look how nice and plump we are. Even when
we don't eat much. Not you so much. Not me. The
others. I'm old and I stink. After my good meal of
beans and hot sauce I might taste good. I doubt it.
But think of all the boys and girls out there. And
they're so young and tender. All that meat! Do you
think the Revolution can resist?
You don't really believe this?
I exclaimedIt isn't possible.
It is, my friend, it is. What I mean is this. The Revolution is living off us, it has nothing else to live on.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
And when we are gone it will go too.
I heard the clatter as he bent and picked up his canes. It was
so dark I couldn't see his face-there was some light on the
table beween us.
I'm old
he said
And I don't taste good. It doesn't matter much to
me. It's all the others I'm afraid for. And that
means you. Think about it.
Pause.
Now it's time to sleep and dream.
We did. That night I dreamt for the first time I could
remember.
We got up and set off down the street. It was then that
we heard the
Om Om Om
and the crackle that followed it. There wasn't anyone else
under the black box above us so we stopped by ourselves.
Brothers and sisters
it began-it was Kamal, of course-by now we knew his
voice by heart.
I must be honest with you. I have bad news. The
Revolution is in danger. What I can't say at this
time. Believe me it is. I will reveal it in due course.
It is a danger to all of us. It comes from within and
without. We must be vigilant.
He paused and there was a coughing. The first time I'd
heard him cough-strange to hear. Oggi looked over at
me-l shrugged. Kamal went on-the first few words halt·
ing as if to catch his breath.
The Revolution is a living thing. We must never
forget that. Like any thing that lives it can be
threatened. A threat to it is a threat to all of us. And
a threat doesn't always look like what it is. We must
learn to look for it. Look for anything that doesn't
fit in. Anything strange, anything unknown. You
know the Revolution. It is yours. Look for things
you don't know.
He paused again. I thought I heard music in the background like a band on parade. He coughed some and muffled it with his hand over his mouth. Much as we thought of
him as the embodiment of the Revolution, I didn't think
we thought of him as a man like other men. Even his shrill
voice made him distinct. His coughing had the opposite
effect. It sounded all too human. We waited and he went
on.
To conclude. There is a clear and present danger.
There are always others who would take my place.
99
�You will not know them. They will not know you as
I do. They haven't my face 'or my voice. Beware of
them. I will be among you ..
There was the crackle and the Om sound and Oggi and I
stood looking up at the black box expecting more. I felt he
was talking to each of us-as if he were present in the box
and looking down at us. Kamal was so enigmatic-we could
never be sure what he meant. There was danger, yes, but
what kind? how to look for it? and how for him to be among
us? The idea of his walking around shaking hands seemed
preposterous. That clearly wasn't what he meant. But we
were learning-always-to wait and watch. The Revolu·
lion had so much to teach us. I felt a little like a child who
had still to learn not to touch what was hot because it
burned.
the morning at the same time I opened my shutter-then
someone would come along and raise it. Like Marissa or
Roderigo. They'd sayThese are really worth twice as much
once they bought it After they left I doubled the price. By
midday I might've gone up two or three times-particu·
larly if it was something people really wanted-like ice on a
hot day in summer. Or in late spring as it then was. Ice was
a marvelous commodity because it melted and was so per·
ishable. I kept it buried in sawdust in the basement and
brought little chunks of it up-gradually at first, then to·
ward the end of the summer all at once. My timing had to
be so precise. If I waited one day too long by then it was
worthless. That's what had happened to Kamal's coins.
They shrank in value day by day. What was more amazing
they shrank in size too. They got lighter. His image on them
got blurred. And the metal itself changed color. It got redder, then turned bluish and finally went green. I asked for
more and more of them in exchange for less. A pack of
cigarettes, for example-especially good American ones
like Viceroys or L and Ms. These went from a handful of
coins to a bagful in the space of a few days. As always
Marissa caught on fast-she started buying cigarettes
when I'd thought she didn't smoke. It wasn't the cigarettes
she was after-it was the coins she wanted to avoid.
How to read the Revolution: that was the trick. It wasn't
simply a question of reading the wall posters-by now
these appeared with monotonous regularity and were read
and as soon forgotten. Nor did we pay that much attention
to his voice-it still came on at all times of the day or night
and we listened while doing something else. Having heard
his story the first time the retelling of it held no great inter·
est for us. His voice we got used to also-the shrillness of it
we came to think of as artifact of the broadcast itself. When
he told us to be on the alert we paid attention-for a timethen our attention lagged. Perhaps we already recognized
that the Revolution would go its own way-not that he,
Kamal, would lead it. He never appeared to us in personwe began again to doubt his existence-in spite of the elec·
tricity and the coins. We might have thought differently
had we to approach him on bended knee or grovelling on
our stomachs. Then we would've thought of him as a
God-but we didn't. I didn't know how it happened: how
we came to think of him as simply another image-as de·
based in time as the coinage on which his face appeared.
That was of more interest to us. The reading of it for a
while was a great skill like divination. Particularly to me in
my business-the coins even without any denomination
were as tricky as the Revolution itself. I'd learned to accept
them-take them as money-when I no longer cared much
about money. I took them in lieu of things. I'd fix a price in
100
The Revolution played such games with us. We were
children to it-the city and all of it our playground. We got
used to this or thought we did-it was all a game, we
thought. Perhaps that's why the real children were so good
at it. They caught on fast. They didn't have a sense of time
to hold them back. And that's why we thought so little of
the past, if at all. It was an impediment to us, a dangerous
one. To get rid of it-to forget-was to be ready for what
came next. I wasn't. I was waiting for her to come back.
This time I hadn't forgotten.
Old Jubal paused and ran his right forefinger along his lips.
I knew the sign-it meant a story.
When I was a student,
he began,
I wasn't very good, as a student. I'm always forget·
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�ting things-simple things. Like how to multiply
and how to spell and each subject we get to I think,
"This is the hardest subject. I'll be so glad to get
through it." But, no, my friend, it wasn't. There
were harder subjects. And harder teachers to go
with them. I had to learn algebra and trigonometry
from an Egyptian. And chemistry and physics
from a Greek.
Pause.
I never get over it. When I think it's going to get
easier it doesn't. So I leave.
I quit school. I never go back. Maybe I join the
army-maybe I drive a taxi. It doesn't matter. I
don't remember. I forget it with all the things I
studied. All I learned is this-to give thanks for
the present. So simple, eh?
He raised an eyebrow.
You know what I mean?
I nodded. Old Jubal sometimes took a long time to get to
the point. He jabbed his finger at me.
No, you don't. If you did you wouldn't be here.
I looked down at my feet. I didn't want to say anything to
offend him. I let him go on for a while-I wasn't paying
much attention. I thought of Lelia for a bit-then of what
I had to get done that day. Suddenly his canes were moving and he propelled himself over and against where I sat.
My friend, suppose I tell you that in days all of this
will be gone. Poof. Like that.
He made a gesture with his left hand as he said it -the
fingers shot out from his closed fist and then closed again.
Gone. Like you're in a desert and dying of thirstyour lips are swollen and black. You stink like I
stink.
I raised my hand to say no-to say I didn't mind. He
brushed it aside and went on.
Eh? what does it matter? You see palm trees,
some silver water below them. So you run. You
can't breathe but you run. You get there. And
what do you find? Eh? Surprise. No surprise.
More sand. Nothing but sand.
He paused.
It's like that, you know. To me this Revolution is a
living thing. It needs to eat and drink. Nobody
sees this now. They will. It's going to get thirsty.
It's going to suck up everything in sight. And all
the things you can't see. You and me with it.
Nothing is ever going to be the same-except
worse.
He was sweating-he wiped the sweat from his forehead
with the back of his hand. I don't know what I'd expected
him to say. I believed him-why not? It was always that I
didn't know what it meant. I got up to get him another
cigarette-the air was thick with smoke-! smelt it all over
myself. He didn't want it-he waved me to sit down. His
eyes fixed me.
You still don't know what I mean.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It wasn't a question.
I don't know myself. What it means for all of us. If
I did I wouldn't be here.
We sat. I thought of Lelia. She didn't belong in our company-the city wasn't a place for her. It was better for
those like Old Jubal and me-those who didn't expect
much-those who didn't care much when they didn't get
it. That was the Revolution again-doing things to timegetting rid of the past and the future. To leave us with a
present that had so few references to it. I should've left
then-! should've listened-! should've known. I didn't. I
had a sense of fear.· That should've been enough. I
should've taken her and gotten out. It wasn't going to be
like that though.
Somehow we'll manage. I always seem to get by,
I said and I left it at that. He scowled at me and opened his
mouth. I saw the gold filling flash.
What about her?
he asked and got up and got his canes moving. He brushed
past me and was gone. It was then it struck me-l didn't
know whom he'd meant. I hadn't told him about Lelial'd never mentioned my mother. With Old Jubal that
didn't matter-he knew there was someone else.
It was Oggi who told me-although I could've found out
from anyone. He came early-I heard his scratching at the
door and let him in. It was drizzling and his face and matted hair glistened with it. He was bursting to tell me-but
wouldn't until I'd asked him over and over. Then it came
out-there were rumors throughout the city that Kamal
was gone.
See!
he smirked! told you so! Didn't I tell you? I knew it.
And then-spitting out his contemptWhat else could you expect from someone like
that?
I didn't answer-there wasn't one. We knew something
had happened-it took us time to find out what. There
was a great surge of happiness, almost elation. And there
was also a sense ofloss. No one knew what to do next. Now
everything seemed possible. Oggi and I headed out into
the street to see what was going on. All sorts of rumors
were on everyone's lips. There was a rustle among people
like dried leaves-on each face, expectancy. As the day
went on we got more and more excited-by the sense of
ourselves and the Revolution. The drizzle stopped. The
clouds broke up and moved west. The sun shone brightly
on streets that were slick and wet. Oggi and I walked aim-
101
�lessly. I wished Lelia were with us-that would've made
the day perfect. I intended to go and get her. I didn't. Per·
haps because I didn't like to think of her as part of the Revolution. To me she was something secret and private-and
all the more precious for being so.
Oggi got more impetuous. He dragged me along behind
him when I wanted to stop and chat. There were rumors
flying all over-that Kamal had fled by boat or by land or
that he'd been picked up by plane. That he'd taken hundreds of suitcases with him containing the sum total of our
wealth. That he was limping and coughing as he went and
hadn't long to live. Strangely we didn't care why. We
pushed and jostled each other in the streets-we slapped
each other on the back and clasped hands. There was a
great feeling of togetherness and moment like swallows
out at sunset and circling. We all felt part of the great undertaking that was our Revolution. No longer was it personified by a man. It was greater than any of us, no matter
how great he might seem. With Oggi that afternoon I felt a
great sense of clarity and companionship. The high purpose of the Revolution was raising us above ourselves. It
was such a great feeling-it was all over so soon. Amazingly, we never knew we were a city under siege until it
was over. We went back to our rooms and slept that night
and dreamt of the Revolution in myriad forms-and while
we did so it ended.
Like that.
Or so it seemed.
The following morning we found out what had taken
place without our knowledge. Oggi and I were hanging out
the window. The air was crisp and the sun bright. He was
humming to h1mself.l was scratching my head-! always
had this itch there when I woke. Then both of us stopped
what we were doing.
What's that?
he said. I looked out and saw it too. For there it was-a
small dark figure at the far end of the street-looking like
anyone else walking down it. Except it wasn't. We knew at
once it wasn't. It got closer-it turned out to be a boyabout Oggi's age or a little older. He was walking nonchalantly down the middle of the street-as if he knew it well
or didn't care. He wasn't one of us-that was for sure. He
was dressed in black and wore a soft hat. His chest was
crisscrossed with bandoliers and there were weapons over
his shoulders and in each hand. It was most of all his face
that was different. More angular than one of ours and
much darker. As he got closer we saw it was leathery as if
endlessly burned by the sun. We saw him look up and see
us-sort of. There was no reaction beyond the flicker of
his eyes.
He went on and many others like him followed. We saw
them filling the end of the street. They made it black with
their bodies. They moved down it until there was nothing
but blackness in it. They weren't all the same. Some were
older. Many were younger and no more than children.
Some had armbands that showed authority. They were all
102
heavily armed-like walking arsenals, I thought. And their
faces all looked hard and leathery, no matter how young
they looked. By now the windows all along the street were
filled with us looking down. You could sense the questions
on everyone's lips. Who were they? Where did they come
from? What was happening? I looked over at Oggi-his
lips were moving as if he meant to speak and didn't know
what to say. The presense of obviously superior beings
filled us with fear and trembling.
A little later we heard the first sounds of the cars and
trucks-the grating of gears and the revving of engines.
The air began to fill with the smell of gasoline. Smoke and
fumes hung in a grey brown cloud over the city in that
direction and drifted to cover the rest of it. And the cars
and trucks were coming out from under the cloud and
roaring down the street. And all the streets all over the
city. The cars and trucks were of all sizes and shapes and
descriptions. Each was jammed full of heavily armed men
also dressed in black. They were in jallopies and in the
backs of roadsters, on dump trucks and pickup trucks, in
jeeps and station wagons. It was awesome. The air was
thick with smoke and fumes. We were soon coughing and
wheezing and gasping for breath. We weren't used to the
smell of gasoline nor to the exhaust-it made us dizzy.
The noise of the engines was deafening-we covered our
ears with our hands. It was no use-the sound went
through walls as easily as through flesh. We were overwhelmed by it. I felt too tired to move, even to hold up my
hands. They fell to my sides. There was a great fatigue
over all of us. Our euphoria of the day before was dead and
gone. None of us had the faintest idea what was going on.
We waited to be told.
The cars and trucks came to a stop all over the city with
their engines still running. The fumes rose from them and
made our eyes water. It was as if we were crying and many
of us were. Men with megaphones soon appeared in the
streets. Their voices boomed off the buildings and echoed
in our rooms. There was nowhere they couldn't be heard.
Citizens,
they saidDon't be afraid. We have come to help you, to liberate you from your oppressors, to give you back
your freedom. You have only to follow instructions and no harm will come to you. Stay inside
and don't come out.
So we did-for days.
To pass the time Oggi and I played games. All kinds of
games-tic-tac-toe, blind man's bluff, jacks, charades, pin
the tail on the donkey-anything to try and take our minds
off what was happening. Or had happened. Soon we began to get used to it-as did all of us-and we saw that, no,
this wasn't the end of the Revolution. It wasn't over. What
had happened to it we didn't know. There was no way to
tell. Each of us was alone with our fears and doubts. The
Revolution remained. It was the one thing we had that was
permanent. More so than buildings or streets, certainly
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�more so than ourselves. The Revolution was like nature to
us-if everything else were taken away '\t remained. So we
sat in our rooms~ each of us alone, no matter how accompanied. For us the Revolution was our greatest
consolation.
It never ceased to dumbfound me that when change
took place it was either so slow it never occurred to us or it
was so fast it was over before we had any awareness of it.
Instead we had to get used to it-as if it was a state of
things that'd always been-when the youngest of us
could've remembered a time when it wasn't. To have done
so would've meant great peril-this above all was an ac·
cepted fact. That's why remembrance for us was so much
a process of selectively forgetting. To start over each day
with new relationships-between people and between
things-and to accept them as givens. It was a criterion of
life for us-the one that mattered if all others didn't. And
so often they were in doubt-how could they not be? It
was hard, if not impossible, to know what was constant in
ourselves when we had so little to measure it against. For
me that was what made Lelia so remarkable-though she
herself didn't think so. In that sense I supposed I was like
every romantic who had ever been. I thought of her as a
North Star or a Southern Cross-to navigate by across
endless dark wastes. Not surprisingly, then, as soon as we
could go out, I did-to her.
She was sitting mending while her old aunt snoozed.
She let me in, gave me a kiss on the cheek and went back
to her mending. That was her livelihood. People brought
her shirts that were torn, dresses that'd been ripped, socks
with gaping holes in them-for we had always to make do
with what we had. I sat across from her and watched-she
was wearing a denim skirt and a white cotton blouse with
her hair in a pony tail. To me she looked like a little girleven though she was almost as old as I. That didn't matter-however she looked I worshipped her. And I worried.
How she was? Was she afraid? Hungry? Lonely? She was
all of these-and quite happy too. I never got over that
either: how anyone could be happy and mean it. But she
was and she did. Her happiness was infectious. I got it by
being near her. I'd smile-to myself at first-then outwardly. I'd get up and go look in the mirror-she used it for
fittings-and see the smile on my face, to make sure it was
there. It was. I saw it. Then I'd go sit next to her and hold
her hand. We'd sit there quietly-her hands still-she
wasn't doing anything-and I thought of us as sharing her
happiness-which was becoming mine too. Extraordinary!
That I was so happy-when all around-the whole city in
fact-was in such a state of turmoil and doubt. It was simTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ply that she seemed more real than anything else. I'd
watch her fingers making the intricate patterns of stitch or
weave and I could've sat there all day as though I were
watching bees building a honeycomb-driven to it by the
geometry in their minds. If I wanted to hold her hand
she'd let me for a while-she knew what it meant to me
and she liked it. Then she'd slide her fingers out of mine
and say
I have to go back to work.
It was all she had-I couldn't say no. It was still more than
anyone else had that I knew of.
Reassured she was all right, I soon left. Something was
bothering me-that is, everything. I wanted to walk and
have my own sense of what was happening. Because the
Revolution had taught me to use my eyes and all of my
senses-and to try and believe them. So as I walked I saw
the city getting used to its occupation. The cars and trucks
that so awed us were everywhere-as were the men in
black who were so heavily armed. They were ominous. But
they did nothing. They stood chatting in groups or sat in
their trucks oiling their weapons. They nodded as I passed
yet made no movement to stop and search me.
I saw Marissa limping along a street-she saw me at the
same time and her face lit up. She had some shopping bags
with her and asked when I was going to open. I told her the
truth. That I had nothing to sell. I promised to let her
know when I did. Many of us were out in the streets trying
to figure out what was going to happen next. There were
as many rumors as people and most of them were about
them. Our guardians, our protectors-whatever they
called themselves. We weren't sure. None of us talked to
them and they made no effort to talk to us. That was how
we referred to them-not knowing otherwise how to call
them. At that point they seemed quite peaceful-in spite
of their appearance. The smell of the gasoline was the
most striking sign of the occupation. It pervaded the city
with its sweetish odor, actually quite pleasant at times. But
there were also the fumes of the cars and trucks when they
were running. These made us short of breath and our eyes
watery. We saw everything through their grey brown haze.
The colors of the city were made dull and flat, from what
they were. In that sense the occupation didn't feel threatening to us-it was more like a change in the weather. And
the weather was strange. It drizzled off and on for days. A
warm drizzle, it was still late summer. There was a greenish mildew on things and their surfaces stayed moist and
slippery. All this time we thought we were getting used to
it. Kamal and what he represented was long gone and forgotten. Then there was the most surprising reminderlike a voice from the dead-in the form of a wall posterobviously his last.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS,
it read-
103
�I BESEECH YOU TO LISTEN TO ME ONE LAST
TIME. I WILL NEVER BE WUH YOU AGAIN
AND I MUST ASK YOUR PARDON FOR MY ERRORS.
FOR ME THE REVOLUTION WILL ALWAYS BE THE
GREATEST THING IN MY LIFE-AS YOU ARE
BECAUSE WE ARE ALL PART OF IT. I AM
GOING NOW-MY EYES WILL CLOSE AND I
WILL CROSS MY ARMS ACROSS MY CHEST. YOU
WILL BE WITH ME ALWAYS. I WILL NOT DIE
ALONE. I WILL THINK OF EACH OF YOU.
I WILL ASK PARDON OF EACH OF YOU. I
KNOW YOU BETTER THAN YOU CAN KNOW. FOR
ME THE FUTURE IS A BLESSING BECAUSE THE
REVOLUTION ALWAYS HAS A FUTURE. I
THINK OF EACH OF YOU FACING IT AND I SAY
BE BRAVE! COURAGE!
IT IS WHAT KEEPS US TOGETHER. WE WILL
ALWAYS HAVE IT AS LONG AS WE LOVE THE
REVOLUTION ABOVE ALL. FAREWELL, AND BLESS
YOU, MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS!
He was gone. We knew that..Not how. Not why. Kamal
never meant so much to us before. We realized that he had
seen what we hadn't. Now we were truly alone. We would
try to forget him because we had to. We knew that much.
But in forgetting him there would be a void where he had
been.
Fortunately Oggi was fascinated by spare parts and all
things automotive. He wasn't doing anything else so I had
him go out and scavenge the city looking for them. He'd
come back with the distributor caps and the oil filtersand all sorts of others I'd never heard of. He was getting
older and more responsible-I told him to keep them and
see what he could do with them. He was mesmerized by
the New Regime-or rather by its most obvious signs-the
cars and trucks roaring up and down the esplanades and
the avenues. To him they were a source of incredible
power-almost magical-yet I also knew how he hated the
New Regime. Most of us did-perhaps all of us-and for
no particularly good reason-beyond that it had so little to
104
do with our lives. And that it was different. Whatever the
reason our hatred of it was always unstated. No one gave a
sign of it-not as such-it was there in the flicker of an
eyebrow or the running of a finger across the bridge of the
nose. You had to know it was there to see it-once you saw
it there was hatred everywhere. It was directed most of all
toward a single enigmatic figure-or rather his name.
7Carlos7. The two things for us were the same.
For us he was a protean figure-a chimera of sortsthat we knew and didn't-all the more horrible for our ig·
norance of him. His image-of which there was nonewas the heart and soul of the Occupation. He came with
them-apparently he was their leader. So it was natural to
compare him with Kamal and the comparison was striking.
Because we never saw him-actually we never saw either
of them-but we never even saw a picture of7Carlos7 nor
heard his voice. He was there all the more so in his name.
To many of us it was the most horrible thing-some
wouldn't say it-if they did they spat it out. They weren't
supposed to, though. There was a way to pronounce itmeasured and without intonation. And we had to make
our peace with it. His name was an ominipresent sign of
the Occupation. Of course the Occupation wasn't what
they called it-to them it was still the Revolution. We got
used to their terms-we had to-and those who didn't
trembled as they spoke. As always your own language was
the fastest way to betray yourself. To whom? Not to usalthough us was less and less definable. They made their
presence merge with ours. Some of us became them. As
time went by what we might've once said to anyone we
would soon say only to ourselves or to loved ones. By then
they could be anyone. They made friends easily-a pack of
cigarettes or a stick of gum would do the trick. Before long
you were saying things you shouldn't. Or maybe you in·
tended to. This whispering went on all the time all over
the city-like a gentle breeze in early summer. In fact, it
was that time of year. The city had never been so beautiful. The trees had rich green growth on them. Flowers
were blooming in all the gardens. Or where gardens had
once been, in piles of rubble in the streets or out of the
cracks of walls. The city took on a festive air. There were
gay colors everywhere-bright blues and pinks, the reds of
roses and poppies, the oranges and yellows oflillies. When
Lelia and I went walking-we did so each evening arm in
arm-she loved to gather them and make a bouquet. She
set one in my room and one in hers-so even when she
wasn't with me I smelt the rich perfume of her flowers that
she was smelling, too. I'd gotten somewhat used to hershe more so to me-though at times I still moved too
abruptly and startled her. One of the joys of being with her
was the chance I got to forget myself.
I seemed a part of her-as did everything else. To me
even the Revolution paled beside her-she was gentle,
yes, she was also more vivid. I loved to watch her do
things-as much as I was coming to love her at rest. To
watch her make a pot of tea. It was such fun. Who
W!NfER/SPRING 1983
�would've believed it? Of course the pot was a can and the
strainer was a linen bag and the tea was a fine black substance like dark sand that the strainer never kept out.
There I was picking the tea from between my teeth with
the tip of a toothpick-the tip of my penknife. Still, I loved
to watch her making it-for me a ritual of great beauty and
meaning. Perhaps that's why I loved her. She illumined
everything she touched.
I couldn't fail to be aware of the incongruities of our relationship-there were so many. I to her. She to me. Both
of us to each other. Both of us to the Revolution. And to
the city. And to the Occupation. And to 7Carlos7. Whoever and whatever he was. We didn't discuss it. It was so
obvious because we lived there. Each of us wanted to find
something beyond what we had-and we had. We cherished it-yet we were afraid. That in spite of ali-or the
little-we could do something would happen to destroy it.
Which was why we never mentioned to each other any of
these things. Because any of them could. There was between us a conspiracy of silence and blindness-not to acknowledge what was there at every hand. At every word.
Whether they were there or not. The Revolution was in
language and thought-as was the occupation. As was
7Carlos7.
He wasn't something you could shut out. He was there
as we spoke between ourselves. He was there to me as I
thought. I thought of him as a mastermind that got into
each of our heads and spread like a bacillus. Yet to all intents and purposes there were no signs of it. Or him. Except in the oblique ways we learned to recognize. I always
thought two tenses belonged particularly to him-the pas-
Because no matter how many times you'd said it, as long as
you hated him-and by inference them-there was the
distinct possibility you would gag on it. As though swallowing gasoline. To mumble, to stutter, to pause in your enunciation-incredible-these were all life threatening acts.
Acts of insurrection they were called. No wonder we practiced his name so much. And the more we practiced the
more we got used to it. Our hatred submerged into ourselves. And we might just as well have hated ourselves.
Maybe we did. Hatred was such a mutable thing for us. We
didn't feel it. Then we were called upon to say his name.
And we did. No emotion-then a flicker of it-his name
spoken evoked it in us. It was then we were truly in danger.
Perhaps we got away with it that time. Perhaps we didn't.
It was so hard to tell. All we knew was that some of us disappeared-as though bodily sucked out of our lives. To
our friends and our relations there was no trace. We were
gone as if we'd evaporated. We knew speech had something to do with it. We knew the Occupation and 7Carlos7
obviously did. But the disappearances were as enigmatic
as his name. They happened. To some of us-to many.
There was no explanation. It was no wonder, then, that we
felt as if we were living on the edge of something at all
times. One false step and we'd be over the edge and gone.
To Lelia and me in love each day was an end in itself.
sive and the imperative. As in
That should be done,
and
Do it!
Incredible that so much power should be concealed in
such little phrases. And not just power-hatred-on our
part. As we recognized the source of that power. It was
insidious-we were made aware of it at all times-even
the most private. Because there was no privacy-as a concept it was dead and gone. There was a sense of concealment, of something to be hidden, not of something that
belonged to us. 7Carlos7 was the manifestation of this
awareness. I never knew for sure if he was a man or not. I
assumed so-it wouldn't have been the first time I was
wrong. He was definitely a presence.-One that spoke to
us in the passive and the imperative. A voice, without a
face, without a voice, nonetheless, a voice. Lelia didn't like
to say his name even to me. It made her uneasy, at times,
nauseous. I couldn't blame her-but we had to learn how
to say it as naturally as saying our own. I made her practice-! practiced myself. To say a name that was the object
of hatred without intonation was the hardest thing for
us-for anyone. That's why it was so revealing-that's
why they made us do it. We had to. It came up all the time.
Every time you said it there was the threat of revelation.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
I couldn't see the point of anything. The Occupation
had been going on for so long we thought it'd always been
there. It settled on us like the clouds of dark exhaust and
haze. We coughed all the time and spat blood and mucous.
The sun moved across the sky like a greyish orange ball.
Seen through the grey haze. The sunsets were fantastic
colors of purple and red. It was hot and muggy that summer. Moving my body and all the spare parts took all my
strength and some I didn't have. And there were times
when Oggi wouldn't do anything-he'd curl up on a pile
of spare parts, pick one up and oil and grease it for hours.
He was blacker than I was, pitch black. His eyes stood out
white in contrast. And he'd lie there for hours rubbing the
part back and forth whistling. The whistling got on my
nerves. When I asked him to stop he shrugged. And
stopped. A little later he started again. It wasn't the two of
us-it was everything. The heat. The air-or what was
now air. The furtiveness that had come over us. 7Carlos7.
And fear.
There was so much of it-all different kinds. There
were more fears than we ever had words for, all of them
would have made our language nothing but synonyms for
fear. Myriad ones. Because it was everywhere and in every-
105
�thing. Most of all it was the fear of disappearance-that
we'd wake one morning and be gone. So many had. Fear
abstract and fear particulate. In contrast the spare parts
business had become a tired joke to me. I'd gotten into it! didn't want to think about it anymore. I wanted-if want
was the word-to sit in my room and be alone with my
fear. To be with someone else was to see fear in them.
With Oggi the fear took the form of whistling and rubbing.
With someone else it was a cough or running a hand back
and forth over the walls or floor. It was a fear of themthey like everything else were now signs of the Occupa·
tion. Fear of cars and trucks. Fear of them as people. Fear
of the little man who came to my shop. Fear of myself.
Fear of giving myself away. Fear of speech. A name-his
name. So many specific fears-fear of each object we
came in contact with-each fear a little different from the
others. To anyone not living as we were such fears
would've seemed unbelievable. Fantastic. Like a chi!·
dren's story of ogres and giants and princesses carried
away from them by princes on the wind. To us it was the
most natural thing in the world. Fear had always been part
of the Revolution-now it was more so-taking a new
form with new objects. Whatever was part of the New Re·
gime was part of fear. Those of us who weren't-that
meant all of us-had it in our blood. Like water we drank it
in and it came out like urine. It passed through us-we
were where it was for a time-then on-through us over
and over-the process repeating itself-endless.
There it was again-the face-or part of it. I saw it for
an instant-then my food came through and the panel
closed. That was it-my contact with the outside worldthat and my bit of blue sky-or whatever color it was. I'd
thought I could get used to anything-the Revolution
made us that way-adaptable or not at all. As always there
was something else-something we didn't expect because
we'd never thought of it. In one sense I'd disappeared. To
everyone I'd known I was gone-ceasing to exist. Yet to
myself-the one person that really mattered-! was very
much there-all the more so because so much else was
gone. The face was the only thing human around-it
peered through the panel in the door-if I didn't move it
studied me. The eyes staring-the ears and chin cut off by
106
the door-that made the face disembodied. In spite of that
it was companionship of sorts. I called to it-it never an·
swered. Or its answer was my food-on the floor~ I didn't
get there in time to catch it. Splot. I had to scoop it up with
the side of my hand and lick it off. It tasted of the floor and
the fungus that grew there. A grey green fungus that flour·
ished because the floor was moist and cold. That was my
vegetation-my flora. And my fauna was a small bug about
the size of my thumbnail that crawled over the walls. I got
used to it-it was the first thing I looked for each daythough I no longer thought of them as days. There was
light-there was dark-there was a sense of alternation
back and forth between them. That was what my calendar
had been reduced to. Each day I got up and washed my
face at the pipe in the corner-! then squatted over the
hole..:.. I balanced myself with my hands against the wall.
That was perhaps the pleasantest experience of the daymy bowel movement. I looked forward to it. Afterwards I
felt relief. Almost composed. My body felt in a state of
equilibrium-I'd gotten rid of what I'd eaten and my
waste. I felt a need to be only myself-and no more. I felt
no suffering as such-~he only thing that bothered me was
the bed springs. They squeaked and rattled when I moved
on them. I never got used to the sound. It woke me at
night-over and over-which is why I had no nightmares.
I woke before they could form. Which is why I was always
so tired. Exhausted. There was no way to get relief from
the things in my mind. They kept piling up-all the things
I didn't think of. And kept forgetting. They were there and
had weight-getting heavier and heavier the more I
couldn't sleep. I tried to sleep on the floor. The cold and
moisture and slime of the fungus were worse than the bed
springs-they made my skin creep. So I went back to
sleeping on the bed-bad as it was it wasn't the worst.
Nothing seemed so bad to me that in time wasn't ordi·
nary. I looked for the bug and saw where he was-! waited
for the face to appear and thought of it as my face. The
eyes staring at me through the panel were the only reflec·
tion of myself I had. I wondered about all the things that
didn't happen. They would've been explanations of what I
was in for. There weren't any and I never knew. Not at
that point. There was no questioning and no duress. At
times I thought I heard cries in the distance. No one ever
came for me. Maybe they weren't cries but doors closing. I
had nothing to go by. Beyond the face, or the part of the
face, which in itself told me nothing. Except that it was
part of something human-that I too was part of. But the
humanity of it was less than I was used to. And I wasn't
used to much. I had nothing to do and nothing to think of.
I lay on the bed and tried not to move. That became a skill
in itself. To alter my weight so the bedsprings wouldn't
squeak. Because it was all I had I became more and more
aware of my body. Preoccupied with it, in fact. I studied
my hands and the way they moved. I spent hours bringing
my thumb across to touch my little finger-or closing my
fingers into my palm to make a fist. Each motion that
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�seemed simple enough in itself got increasingly complex
when looked at in detail. I tried to move my fingers so
slowly I couldn't see them move. As if I were a creature
that was going to live forever and had all the time in the
world to do whatever it wanted.
Before I did anything I thought about it to decide if it
was worthwhile. That is, if it had a purpose. Most things
didn't. So I eliminated them-in the same way I got rid of
waste with my bowel movement every day. I wanted to get
by on less and less. To be like the bug on the wall that took
all day to get from one point to another. He too had all the
time in the world to go back. There was a lot to learn from
him. Somehow I'd decided he was a he. And I studied his
movements with the same intensity that the face studied
me. Eyes staring, lids unblinking. The bug made me care·
ful of where I stepped and how I moved. The last thing I
wanted to do was to crush the bug inadvertently. I was
concerned for him. When he didn't move for an unusual
length of time I got up, ever so slowly so the bedsprings
rustled but didn't squeak, and went over to take a look.
Perhaps I saw his antennae quiver or one of his wings was
raised-his wings weren't much-stumps more like. What·
ever it was adequate-my companionship remained as~
sured. I went back to bed as slowly as I'd moved from it.
One thing above all never ceased to amaze me each time I
lay down-its length. Because it was mine. My feet
touched one end and my head the other-the bed itself
didn't seem accidental. That is, it seemed part of a greater
plan, one that in time might be revealed to me. Not that I
was unhappy with where I was. I felt more secure than I
might've felt elsewhere. But that peace of mind was an ar·
tifact, as was my bodily composure. I had only to think of
her, any part of her, an ear, a little finger, a lower lip-and
my body began to shake as from a fever. The bedsprings
squeaked. The walls appeared to vibrate in time. My heart
pounded and my skin prickled. It was the obverse oflovefear. The thought of her-any thought of her-triggered
it-and cast my whole being into doubt. I shuddered. The
bedsprings rattled. I didn't know what was happening to
me. I held onto the bedframe for dear life. And this didn't
happen once-it was over and over. I couldn't stop myself.
She was so dear to me that all else was at risk. I tried to
steady my mind-to look for the bug-to count the days.
It helped a bit. Afterwards I lay gasping for breath. Each
move I made was tentative.
One of those days was the Anniversary of the Revolu·
tion-I didn't know which.
I didn't mean to get angry-it happened like that-like a
light had gone off in my head-or I saw a flash and that
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
was the stimulus for it. Whatever the cause the transition
was so fast I wasn't aware of it. There I was not angrythere I was very much so. Pounding the door. Kicking it.
Not feeling the pain in my feet. No sensation, in fact. The
anger had taken me over as if it were another life form. I
was screaming-or shouting-whatever it was it was loud.
I heard my own voice so much magnified it wasn't mine.
My hands and feet seemed to be on their own too. It didn't
last very long. I hadn't the strength for it. It was there in a
short burst of tremendous energy. It was as soon spent.
Gone. I went back to nonanger, my muscles flaccid, my
skin sensitive again. It amazed me that I'd even been able
to get angry. There was nothing to get angry at. The face
wasn't there. The bug was high up and out of sight, the
blue sky was still blue sky. My anger-or any other emo.
tion I might've had-was incongruous. It had no purpose.
It didn't belong there. Without it I lapsed back onto the
bed. In time the face appeared in the door, my food came
through and the bug showed up on the wall not far over
my head.
I felt ashamed of myself. In relation to everything else
my anger was such a pettiness. I went and scooped up my
food. I ate. I was so used to the fungus I didn't taste it. If
the food smelled to me it was simply the smell of it. Not
bad. Not good. A characteristic of existence without crite.
rion. I began to identify with the bug. I thought of myself
looking down at myself on the bed. Larger and whiter than
necessary. And curious too. Why all the moving about?
And the noise? And the huffing and puffing? Imagine!
There was no sense of real economy about it. Truly the
whole thing was an enormous waste. It was so much better
to be so much smaller again I had the sense of going into
myself and looking out. In my head, I'd become as small as
the bug-the rest of my body was an enormous encum·
brance. I stopped eating. The food piled up in front of the
door in a little mound. It began to stink-not its own smell
anymore. Worse. Much worse. A smell with color-a
greenish orange. I became aware of the face looking in at
me more and more. I looked back as if from beyond. I no
longer thought it could see me. I saw a finger appear and
scratch the side of the nose on the face. And the expres·
sion-or that part of it I was exposed too-didn't stare as
much. I saw the face turn sideways. There was an ear and
hair. I heard a voice from very far off, like an echo. Or the
echo of an echo. Like a scraping. There was an intonation
to it so I took it to be a voice. It amazed me how much
better I began to feel. Lighter. Buoyant. The carcass I'd
been carrying around all these years was finally getting
manageable. I lay on the bed and had no need to think of
the springs and not moving. They squeaked, if at all, very
faintly. It was at this point I thought of my disappearance
as taking place. Not their disappearance of me. That had
already happened. This was mine of myself-as if bit by
bit I were withdrawing from my own existence. It was a
feeling most pleasant-not unlike that at the end of my
bowel movement. After much pushing and squeezing I
107
�was left with a sense of self and a relief from waste. I felt an
obvious lightness-not giddy-I remained clear-eyed and
stable. Things seemed far away and distant and had no
·
hold on me.
It was in this state I saw the door open and a man come
in. He had a stool under his arm and he set it on the floor
and sat on it. He looked very small-no larger than my
hand-the stool was small too. The size a child might have
for its dolls. He said nothing. He watched me and I
watched back. Then with alarm I realized he was getting
larger-or my sense of him was. I tried to hold myself back,
to keep away; I couldn't. I kept coming closer, as he did,
getting larger. I felt myself getting heavier and weighed
down, dense. It was his being there that'd done it to me. I
knew that much. And as he got larger his appearance took
on more detail. He was dressed as an officer of some sort.
There were epaulettes on his shoulders and gold braid
hung down from them. His uniform was a dark green and
creased so sharply there were angles to it. At some point I
was aware again I was my normal size. I saw his forefinger
tapping on his knee. What he thought of me I couldn't
know. His face-it wasn't the face in the door-was without emotion, though not without interest. I propped my·
self up in bed. The springs squeaked. I saw how close he
was, the dark color of his uniform filled my field of vision.
His hand reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and
reached across and put it between my lips. The smell of
the tobacco, rank and acrid, and the dryness of its taste
against the tip of my tongue was a shock to me. The sec·
ond shock was when he lit it. The flame from his lighter
flared in my face and I jerked my head back. Then there
was the smoke from the cigarette itself. I puffed. It filled
my head and made me dizzy. I gagged on it. I coughed. I
felt the cigarette slipping from my lips. It did, onto my
chest, I watched it burn a small hole in me. I meant to
reach forward and grab it, but I couldn't move my arms or
my hands. My body twitched. There was the pain of the
burning, intense, pointing into me. Then his hand came
over and took it off and put it back in my mouth and held it
there. I puffed again. The smoke made me giddy. It filled
the room. It clouded over his face. It made my eyes water.
They closed. There was the burning pain in my chest,
though the cigarette was between my lips. I had to finish. I
knew that. I puffed and puffed. My head felt full of the
smoke. It also began to feel composed. Relaxed. My hands
didn't move but my fingers opened out from my palms. I
looked up at him, he must've seen it in my eyes. I was
grateful. He smiled, a narrow smile, no creasing of his
cheeks. Nonetheless a smile. I tried to smile back. I
thought I did. He took the end of the cigarette from be·
tween my lips and threw it in the corner.
That's better? No?
he said.
Mundt's the name. Pleased to meet you.
Pause.
How are you feeling today?
108
I meant to answer. I tried to. I opened my lips in an 0 to
speak. I thought of what I was going to say. Something in·
nocuous like fine or OK. Instead I said nothing. I mouthed
my answer. I knew I was saying nothing. I didn't know
why. He must've understood-this Mundt. He nodded
and his hand came forward and patted mine. It was then I
saw how huge his was. How hairy at the knuckles. How
large the knuckles were in relation to the rest of the finger.
There was something strange about them too. There was
an extra joint and the tips of the nails buried themselves in
the flesh at the tip of the fingei. I was more impressed with
his hands than with his uniform. I watched them as he
spoke.
Even if we don't expect you to be happy here, it's
not that bad is it?
Pause.
Food every day. Drink. Time to think things over,
no?
His forefinger pressed against his thumb-they flattened
out and the forefinger of the other hand came over to
stroke them.
Not at all what you expected, eh? A bit of a surprise?
I looked up-there was a twinkle in his eye. He settled
back on the stool.
You know we don't want anything from you. I
mean we're not going to torture you or anything
like that. I bet you've heard stories about interro·
gations. Electrodes to the genitals. All night beat·
ings on the soles of the feet. Maybe someone told
you about being hung upside down from a bar?
He sighed. His lips were large like his fingers. I nodded and
kept nodding. He seemed to expect it.
I thought so. It doesn't happen here. I don't know
where people get such ideas. They make them up
and then they believe them. There's nothing to be
afraid of. It's only natural to be like that, people
are. So what? It means nothing.
I looked down and saw the tips of his fingers come to·
gether to form a point. He looked down at it -then ·at me.
You can't help what you are, we know that. Nor
can anybody else. I mean if you're a petty bourgois that's what you are, no?
I nodded.
So we don't care about your little tricks. They
don't make any difference to us.
His voice was guttural and flat -as if he were resigned and
had said it many times before. A strange fellow this
Mundt-nice enough. I nodded as much as I could with·
out overdoing it. I wanted him to see I agreed with every·
thing he said.
If you hoard or steal or fabricate we don't care.
People don't believe it but we don't. If you call
yourself an entrepreneur that's your business.
He paused. His hand came up to the side of his face and
he ran his forefinger along his nose. My eyes moved up
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�with it and I found myself looking into his. I didn't mean
to. It happened without my awareness of it. They were
dark grey-the color of slate. I looked down as fast as I
could. I didn't want him to get upset. He licked his lips and
continued.
You know this place isn't so bad. There are lots of
people like you here. Well meaning. They don't
think they've done anything. I mean you don't
think you've done anything, do you?
I didn't nod. I shook my head. I'd almost nodded. I caught
myself in time. My mouth opened to speak, to say something, to explain. I didn't. I couldn't.
Everyone's the same.
He sighed.
That's why interrogations are useless. So we get
you to confess, then what? The next day you don't
remember any of it. If we want you to remember
we have to keep telling you. Day after day. It's
useless for everyone. Besides, there's nothing you
know that we need to. The whole thing is a waste.
He looked down at his feet. His fingers were twisting together so I couldn't tell his hands apart. I'd stopped nodding-! didn't know what to agree to. He shrugged and
looked up. I looked down. I'd been watching him with my
head down with the upper part of my eyes.
You didn't expect me to come, did you?
I shook my head. I nodded. I wasn't sure which I meant.
No one does. You know people think we don't
know.
He looked sad as he said it.
That your life here, or out there for that matterhe waved his hand toward the bit of blue skyGoes on and nobody sees what you're doing. It's
not so. We know. Because you don't know don't
think we don't. Maybe we miss something once in
a while, a little thing here or there, not much. But
we know enough to know.
Pause. He looked toward the window, some light from it lit
his face and made it lighter.
You know there are a lot of things in life people
don't figure out. They get older and they die and
they never know. I think we're all that way somehow, no?
He said it softly, as if to himself. I nodded, not so much to
him: I felt that way too.
Well, I'll tell you one thinghe turned and looked down at me. The light was gone
from his face.
You're better off here than anywhere else.
His thumbs came out of his belt and he pointed a forefinger at my head.
Right here. Now.
Pause.
You know what I mean?
I thought I did. Yes. I nodded. He turned away slightly; he
started to say something and stopped, as if to rephrase it.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Let me put it this way,
he went on.
You live here. You grow up. You get old. All the
time you get by. Maybe better. Maybe worse. You
think you've got it all figured out. In your business
maybe your're putting something aside for your
old age?
He turned back as he said it. Abruptly he sat down on the
bed. The springs didn't squeak then. They went baing,
boing, baing. The room reverberated with the sound of his
sitting. I felt his immensity loom over me. There was no
defense. I was helpless like a newborn baby. All the while I
felt frail and ancient. He spat out his next words as if he
were mad and I tried to shrink back into the bed.
Don't bother. There isn't anything to figure out
anymore. You'll never see it again whatever it was.
His forefinger came down stiff in the middle of my forehead.
You've had it. You know it. I know it. Life isn't
what it used to be. Don't forget that.
Pause.
You can't go back to your little village and grow
corn. If you had such a village. There aren't any
more.
His forefinger lifted off and hung over my head-suspended.
There's a lesson in all of this, no? So what if you
learn itshrugit won't do any good.
He put his hands on his thighs-about to get up. He licked
his lips. They were moist and glistening.
Maybe we should have many lives? To come back
and next time try what didn't work out this time.
Amusing. People in villages think like that. Except
they're all dead and they don't come back.
He got up. I followed him with my eyes to his full height.
I say good-by now. You enjoyed my visit? Interesting, eh?
I nodded for the last time.
It makes for a change, I know. We all need a little
change now and then. Make the best of it, I tell
you. It1l turn out all right.
He was looking straight at me, his forehead furrowed.
There were beads of sweat on it.
If you have nothing and you want nothing, what's
to lose? Eh, nothing.
That was it. He didn't say anything else. He looked down
at me for a bit, pensive, abstracted. Then he turned and
left. The door shut behind him with a thank. The face appeared in it, looked at me and left. I was alone again-except now I had the vivid impression of this Mundt's presence. He loomed in the air around me even after he'd
gone. I didn't think why he'd come or what he'd meant. I
knew what I'd understood-what I knew. I agreed with it
all. I really thought I had nothing left to lose.
109
�WITH 0RJAN AT THE GREAT JAPAN EXHIBITION
Someone in Stockholm counted out the skins
And told you how many golden buckToothed beavers had been killed to make
The coat. And yet it's not the coat that draws
Astonished glances from these Portuguese
With their ungainly noses.
They recognize in cheek and forehead, frozen
To silence by the snow, then quick
As evergreens released to freshness,In lips configuring a phrase
Of sleek imbalance, molded by chosen
Vowels lifted to sadness in a lilt
And overheard as music-in these
They feel what I, when thunderstruck, had felt:
That the same fancy etched your look
As prompted the master of the brush
To practise for a lifetime his bamboo
And then exhaust it in a single stroke.
Only the tiger is unsurprised,
Alone in the cold salon.
His liquid stripes are yours, his curvings yours,
And with a bounding your seraphic shadow
Impresses strangeness onto silk,
Enshrines a celebration in a screen.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
110
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The Division of the West-and Perception
Leo Raditsa
Introduction
We live in a divided world. This is a common phrase that
statesmen repeat, and their audiences ignore and forget.
And that nobody much understands: it is too obvious.
This division is not only a "political" fact-Churchill's
"Iron Curtain" -but the most fundamental fact of our
lives. It reaches every aspect of our living our art, our
thinking, and our perception. It involves most of the nations of the world and all areas of life. Its main characteristic is a capacity to spread and to touch everything. Because
it is at once so close and so remote, it is at the same time
obvious and incomprehensible. We call this division "total
1
war" -and that name haunts our imagination.
This division has in fact replaced the devil, who-many
thought-had been done away with. But with the withering of religion, or at least of the readiness to cope with neither its presence nor its absence, the devil has not been
known as such. Somewhere the free nations sense they
face evil, but are embarrassed to know it. Knowing it unflinchingly stinks somehow of a relapse into superstition.
There is no devil. But we believe men can be angels. The
greatest murder in this century has come in the name of the
greatest aspirations; aspirations that many dare not deny,
lest they lose the good opinions of their neighbors; aspira-
Leo Raditsa has recently published Some Sense about Wilhelm Reich
(New York 1978), "Augustus' Legislation Concerning Marriage, Procre-
ation, Love Affairs and Adultery" (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der
Roemischen Welt, Berlin 1980, 13,2), "Iranians in Asia Minor" (in The
Cambridge History of Iran, Cambridge 1983, 3,1), ''The Source of World
Terrorism," (Midstream, December 1981) and "Why Were We in Vietnam?" (Midstream, June-July 1982).
The above essay comes from an unpublished book, Rationality and
the Perception of Depth, and the Division of the West in the Twentieth
Century.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tions that paralyze those incapable of living them and
which, therefore, can be exploited to excite guilt. The totalitarian regimes parrot our ideals of "self-determination of nations, or of "peace" back to us.
Such divisions are not common. But they have occurred
before. During the Peloponnesian War, during the Reformation, and in the Wars after the French Revolution,
which began the crises we continue to live. 1 The characteristic of such wars is that they spread, that they increase
on what they feed, that they are always world wars. They
touch everybody and everything. And they cannot be
stopped except by men who understand them, because
they are about things men do not understand. Hitler said
men will only die for things they cannot comprehend 2
The division of the West first occurred in 1914. It has
continuously intensified and spread not only on battlefields, but in the minds and hearts of men. In the aftermath of the Second World War, especially in 1947-48, it
grew deep and unmistakable. Until the sixties and the Indochina War few could deny it-although many, in order
to find the strength for the next step, chose at times to
ignore it. Like the violence after the First World War, the
renewal and intensification of the division after 1945 surprised many and disappointed all who had endured the
carnage in the promise that it would bring about a new
world, with a living peace and tangible concord. But these
disappointments are the very stuff of the war that has
brought about the division of the West, for it continually
excites expectations in order to disappoint them.
The First World War was a conventional war that surprised a world that took itself to be deeply at peace, and
baffled it, for it had no idea what the war was about. In the
inebriation of the expectation of a new world that overtook
the world in 1917, the war destroyed many major govern-
111
�ments and constitutions, above all in Russia and Germany,
Austria, and a few years later in Ihlly. This destruction of
governments and the exultation at their destruction, which
found expression in the myth of "revolution", in the myth
that a spontaneous upheaval of the people swept away the
governments, became the most telling characteristic of this
continuous war that has brought about the division of the
West, and that continues to deepen it.
This division spreads through polarization. Polarization
divides the world into two attitudes (ideologies) that over·
come a world made of states of various size. In its final effects polarization takes place in people's minds. It func·
tions on the assumption that before you can destroy
people and the governments that protect them, you must
destroy their capacity to reason, to perceive the difference
between freedom and slavery, between the constructive
and the destructive. The ultimate model of this polarization for international relations is civil war or sedition. This
is now called, with the ignorance of the educated, "revolution" and "class war." The characteristic of civil war 1 ac·
cording to both Thucydides and Hobbes, is precisely that
it spreads, that it is unstoppable, and that it reaches men's
minds themselves, their perception. That it alters their
perception. The struggle centers on perception, the very
perception that has been the battleground of Western phi·
losophy since at least the seventeenth century. But now
ceaseless war for more than two generations has turned
the questioning of philosophers into a matter of life and
death for everyone. For those who cannot see will neither
live nor survive.
On its deepest level this division and polarization of the
world functions to prevent contact, that is, perception in
depth-the world seems flat to our eyes-and its equiva·
lent in the mind and heart, the experience of rationality
and the self-evident. It tends to divide and to polarize qualities such as freedom and authority, and distort them into
shadows or dim reflections of themselves. In the instance
of freedom, into license; in the instance of authority, into
authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Once so distorted,
these qualities tend to define each other in their hatred
and in their destruction of each other, rather than in an
aggressive dialogue. Such a dialogue would be the true
Aristotelian mean, the mean in depth, not the mean of
compromise. Because it cripples rationality and the
strength, confidence, and courage that come with it, polar-
destruction of forms in the name of freedom, there is a
yearning for their restoration that has something of the
straightforwardness of the eighteenth century about it;
but more assurance, resilience, and sobriety-and more in·
nocence and wisdom, the innocence and wisdom that
comes after suffering. 3 Constitution and form generally
provide the test of content, of the readiness to act on what
one says. They allow us to tell the difference between acts
and propaganda, between feeling and impulse. In contrast
to this is the attitude, typically communist, that the end
justifies the means, that content-good intentions and
promises of a radiant future-authorizes the destruction
of forms, of law, and constitutions.
Finally, this polarization tends to make us perceive ourselves as indistinguishable from our enemies, in the illusion that not telling our differences might make for our
survival It makes us feel as destructive and self-destructive
as those who want to destroy us. The Soviet attempt to
dominate the world feeds on this self-hatred. This polarization spreads largely because of unacknowledged fear of
the actual military dangers that threaten us. Who looks at a
map?
I have been writing as if the division between the free
countries and totalitarianism were fundamental But the
real division occurred before there was any totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is a consequence of the division and the
incapacity to cope with it, not its cause. The division in its
starkest, unadulterated form took shape during, and especially after, the First World War. That war that nobody really understood started out between different peoples, not
between freedom and slavery. In 1914, at the start of the
war, one could still speak of freedom without equating it
with democracy. The world was bigger than democracy,
and politics was much less important, and life more easily
distinguished from it.
The division of the West, and the disturbances in perception I have mentioned, betray themselves most strikingly in art. Nobody can see the world whole; except-and
this is crucial~the words that are written in Russia but
published in the West. Western painting has tended more
and more toward a form with content, without a recognizable world, while painting in the totalitarian world pretended to see a world it could not perceive.
ization fashions an immobilizing situation. Force, rather
than strength, appears to be decisive. And is often in fact.
The division of the West also shows itself in a separation
of form and content, especially in politics. In the free West
we are impatient with the safeguards and the indirectness,
the due process of representative and parliamentary democracy. We do not understand representation. We want
to seize on problems directly, and, therefore, take political
demonstrations, which intimidate thought, words and
action, for granted. In the East of Europe and in China,
where people have known the murder that comes of the
112
1 The Division since 1945-and Stagnation
since 1917
The division of the West shows itself most obviously in
the division of Germany, a subject so obvious that nobody
pays much attention to it, and also in the division of Korea,
and China-with Taiwan-and, of course, until 1975, of
Vietnam. The division of Germany also means the diviWINTER/SPRING 1983
�sion of Europe. Without the division ,of Germany there
would be no division of Europe, or of the rest of the world.
The division of Germany never intended by the free
West exists because there is no peace 'treaty. The nonexistence of a peace treaty is not some unimportant formality for just the same reason that marriage is not merely
a piece of paper. The lack of a peace treaty means we did
not know how to settle the Second World War despite victory and the apparent cessation of the fighting in Europe.
It meant the war had not ended, or that it had ended in a
mere truce.4 A formal treaty would have required the removal of all Soviet troops not only from Germany but
from all of what has come to be called Eastern Europe
since the War. The absence of a peace treaty meant the
war continued, no matter how fervently we wished to
deny it.
Our incapacity to restore full sovereignty to Germany
and to force the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Europe
may mean that we did not have the confidence to risk full
sovereignty in Europe again, even if we had know how to
restore it. That we preferred to bring totalitarianism and
the Soviets into the middle of Europe rather than to face a
full-fledged restoration, or attempt at restoration-and restoration in all cases meant creation of legitimate governments, a process that receives its first real test with the passage of a generation. Somewhere in the first volume of his
memoirs, Kissinger says as much. He admits that the
spread of totalitarianism, and the consequent division of
much of the world between free countries and totalitarian,
has given the world a kind of stability it did not have before. I think this dreadfully wrong. I think that the war has
gone on more intensely, first of all with the Soviet seizure
of half of Europe without having to fight us or the rest of
Europe for it. Only it has gone on without direct fighting,
in Europe, between the free countries and the Soviets.
But whether it is wrong or not, dreadful or not, is not the
real question. There is no way of settling a war one does
not understand. And unless you can settle it you are probably condemned to eventual undoing in war-in battle or
not-for the incapacity to bring victories into settlements
turns them into mere incidents in a war that cannot be
stopped.
Nineteen forty-five complicated the situation for free
countries whose constitutions, especially if they are inherited, presuppose a capacity to distinguish between war and
peace. It forced nations to carry on wars, and pretend they
were at peace-a situation that tied the tongues ofleaders in
free countries, and forced them into something like totalitarian hypocrisy, for they could act but could not explain
why they acted, which meant that eventually they could not
act at all and lost the confidence of their electors.
Because the division of Germany and Europe and the
consequent antagonism between the Soviet Union and
the United States means that the war is not over, the
United States and the free countries must go along with
the Soviet Union in its passionate profession of hatred of
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nazism and fascism, a hatred that seems to increase with
the passage of time. Until recently this going along meant
"no enemies on the left"; for the left was portrayed as the
only sure antidote to fascism and nazism. Stalin at Yalta
had infuriated Churchill by calling any government that
was anti-fascist, democratic.5 In his footsteps, the Soviet
Union continues to equate a democracy" with antifascism
and antinazism, and to call any country it desires to undo
"fascist." Since 1967, at least, it has used the word to
smear Israel, whose capacity to defend itself stirs Soviet
hatred and keeps it from seizing the Middle East. 6 In
much of the West, perhaps most obviously in Italy, until a
few years ago, when it became apparent to many that the
most organized and deadly terrorism came from left, it was
enough to call anything "fascist" to discredit it without
further discussion.
The power of this little word "fascism" must come from
somewhere. It cannot come from the fearful memory of
the past, especially in a time that shows itself most in its
forgetfulness. Its power comes from the past's persistence
in the present, from the continuation of the war in the
present, and the refusal to see it. But at the same time this
little word masks the way the war continues in the present,
for it pretends the danger from nazi Germany persists. In
fact the same danger does persist but it does not come
from the same regime.
The Soviet Union and China continue nazi Germany's
War. This exploitation of the memory of a fear, which is in
some way comfortable because safe, to distract from actual terror and murder going on daily before our eyes, is
only possible because of the incapacity to end the war
which shows itself in the division of Germany. The division of Germany, and the division of the West that comes
from it, continue the war and at the same time make it
impossible to face our past and resolve Germany's future.
This evasion of the past means that we must keep its memory alive artificially, especially the memory of past hatreds,
the main drive of Soviet propaganda. It makes it impossible to acknowledge that the defeated were not entirely
wrong, the victors not entirely right. A peace treaty, a real
peace treaty, would have meant acknowledging that nobody was entirely right. To know that neither side was entirely right, is to know our tragedy for what it is, to recognize that something was destroyed in those wars that was
valuable and that it is not going to be easy to recreate, restore or refashion. To know the tragedy of our times for
what they are, would mean facing present danger instead
of seeking relief from it in the horror of a past whose horror people did not recognize at the time.
The insistence that the Allies, who included the Soviet
Union, were entirely right, and the Axis entirely wrong
made it impossible to tell the Soviet Union to withdraw its
troops from Eastern Europe immediately after the war, for
those who are entirely right can do no wrong. The concentration on the myth of the past is a way of avoiding the
present, especially the continuance of the past in the
113
�present. Acknowledging we were not entirely right or
wrong would make the world whole again. It would make a
tougher, more straightforward, more painful-and much
less dangerous place. Until we understand that peace is
much harder than war, the war that calls itself peace will
continue-which means it will spread. The politicization
of all areas of life, which is the first sign of its advance, will
also spread.
This insistence of being wholly right has made our cen·
tury incapable of distinguishing real greatness, whose de·
fects are obvious, from the parody of it by little weak men
who might have been great. No time since the time of the
Trojan war has been so niggardly in the recognition of
greatness, and, therefore, such a patsy to thugs and mur·
derers. Like Hitler and Stalin, whom it adores when they
are alive, hates after their death. This hatred after adora·
tion amounts to disowning your own life after living it.
And it goes on. You only have to read the unbridled-and
never convincing-hymns of praise to Chou En·Lai and
Mao Tse·Tung and North Vietnamese party men in Kis·
singer's memoirs to see it. This fascination with these little
men who seem all powerful but whose apparent omnipo·
tence is only made of weakness is a fascination with mur·
der.
At the end of the Second World War, before the distor·
tions that pass for memory-like the myth that only the
Communists resisted Hitler-that prolong the Second
World War took hold, men like James Forrestal and Walter
Lippmann knew the importance of the future of Ger·
many, not only for Germany, but for all of Europe and,
therefore, for the whole world.? And they did not hesitate
to speak of it openly, in a way that appears unabashed
now. The sacrifice of Poland, and the public denial of it in
the final communique at Yalta, made it impossible for the
British and the United States to do much more than
weakly insist on German unity at Potsdam. The loss of Po·
land, which had been the subject of torturous negotiations
throughout 1944 that Churchill had stated repeatedly
would decide the peace, made it impossible to settle Ger·
many. It set the terms of the struggle we have lived with
ever since without, for the most part, understanding it in
any terms that allow a mastery of it. Instead, with the doc·
trine of containment we accepted the Soviet terms of the
struggle without realizing that the readiness to go along
without a settlement meant continuing the war.
This evasiveness about Germany, and the obsession
with the Second World War that has come with it, has had
its consequences. It was Germany, in an effort to deal with
its future on its own, not the United States, that initiated
the policy of "detente" in 1967-as Kissinger admits in his
memoirs. The United States acquiesced to German "Ost·
politik" because it did not dare oppose it. This policy has
drawn Europe away from the United States without
strengthening it. In the years after the war men foresaw
these consequences of going along with the actual division
of Germany, and insisted on its unity more clearly than
114
they do now that the consequences are here for all to see:
"Certainly we cannot default Europe to Russia" -to do so
would be to invite attack "within the next two decades" by a
totalitarian land colossus armed with all the sea and air power
which the whole of Europe could, under authoritarian management, produce.
. .. "As you know, I hold that world stability will not be re·
stored until the vacuum created by the destruction of German power and the weakening of the power of Western Europe has been filled-in other words, until a balance of power
has been restored in Europe." Such a balance of power would
include military strength, but "I believe that economic stabil-
ity, political stability and military stability must develop in
about that order.''s
In an important book in 1968, The Discipline of Power,
George Ball tried to recall the importance of Germany.
But his words even then sounded quaint and old fash·
ioned:
For the future of Gerrriany after two wars is a riddle we must
solve with care. It lies at the heart of the relations between
East and West. It is in many ways the most intractable and
quite likely the most important problem we face. 9
The absence of a peace treaty meant in the most spe·
cific terms that the fighting on the European fronts had
come to a halt but that the war had not ended, because
there were no coherent terms for ending it. There is no
way of ending a war you do not understand. The U.N.,
which had served as a distraction from the discussions for
the future of Poland at Yalta, substituted the aspiration for
peace in the future for actual negotiations for a peace
treaty that made some sense of the world in the present. It
served also to blind people to the startling fact that the
United States and Britain had thought little in concrete
terms about settling the war, that they did not know what
to do with victory in a war that had been forced upon
them-and that they had brought upon themselves.
25 Aprill947 ... At the conclusion I said it was manifest that
American diplomatic planning of the peace was far below the
quality of the planning that went into the conduct of the war.
We regarded the war, broadly speaking, as a ball game which
we had to finish as quickly as possible, but in doing so there
was comparatively little thought as to the relationships between nations which would exist after Germany and Japan
were destroyed. The United Nations was oversold; sound in
concept and certainly the only hope for improvement in the
world order, it was built up over-extravagantly as the solution
to international frictions that had existed for centuries. Now
there is a danger of its being cast aside by the American public in a mood of frustration and disappointment. 10
A few months later, on July 26, Robert Lovett, the Un·
der Secretary of State, deepened Forrestal's analysis:
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�... He spoke of the lack of planning fqr peace in the State
Department and the casual and off~the-cuff decisions of the
late President, and referred to Churchill's remark that at
Yalta he had been dealing with the "shell of a man" and not
the man himself. Lovett added that the great political error in
the postwar period was the failure to insist upon the writing
of peace treaties while our troops and military power were
still evident in Europe. Nothing, he said, could have stopped
the American forces which were at that time deployed in Germany. II
Probably nothing betrays more the confusion and the
desperation of statesmen after the war than the occurrence of meetings like Yalta and Potsdam, the first of
many summit meetings that have never brought agree·
ment. They were born of a desperate notion that a few
"great" men could make peace on the strength of their
"personal" friendship. And that is part of the reason why
"friendship" has become a word we blush to use. They
substituted talk for negotiation. At Yalta Churchill spoke
often as if he were in Parliament-but there was no one to
listen. Roosevelt was exhausted unto death-and Stalin
had no use for words except as traps for those who spoke
them. And by pretending to hear them in private, he kept
Churchill from speaking them in public where they might
have really counted. In some sense Yalta and Potsdamand not the U.N.-were the first to substitute the aspira·
tion for peace in the future for the actual negotiation of
peace in the present. And the substitution of aspiration for
the action of actual agreement was just what Stalin
wanted, for he knew the cultivation of aspiration you had
no intention of fulfilling weakened and, eventually, undid
men.
The policy of unconditional surrender made the conclusion of a peace treaty difficult, for it destroyed German
sovereignty and no peace treaty could be concluded with·
out Germany's consent. Conclusion of a peace treaty re-
quired the restoration of, or at very least the agreement to
restore, German sovereignty. And the restoration of sover-
eignty or its creation-for it amounts to the same thingas the whole history since the First World War shows, is
extremely difficult, and in any case requires much more
than a generation. Rousseau thought it impossible. Cer·
tainly, it is impossible unless the victors realize its difficulty. Neither to restore it entirely or to destroy it
entirely-the situation of Germany since 1945-means
threatening the sovereignty of the victors and all their al·
lies whose assurance of sovereignty depends on them, especially when there are regimes like the Soviet that feed
on the destruction of sovereignty, for whom war called
"revolution" and "peace" means the destruction of sover-
eignty. And without the recognition of sovereignty, there
can be no experience of reality, of the difference between
life and death, war and peace. Without it all nations invite
questioning not only with words, but with acts that aim to
destroy any people or nation not strong enough to resist.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The most obvious consequence of the absence of a
peace treaty, the division of Germany, is an extreme exam-
ple of the communist technique which threatens many nations called independent but actually struggling for sovereignty and legitimacy. This technique splits countries
against themselves under the cover of a supposedly spontaneous civil war that is actually aggression from the outside. In the extreme instance of Germany, the defense of
West Germany might mean the destruction of all of Germany in the actual outbreak of war. To defend itself Ger.
many must risk its destruction. This contradiction that defense would bring destruction is at the center of the peace
movement, which started in the Federal Republic in response to the decision of Italy, Germany, and Britain to
accept the Pershing II and cruise missiles at the end of
1979.
The division of the West that dwarfs the relations between nations also reproduces itself within the free nations through polarization in thinking to the point that in·
dividuals of the "Left" and the "Right" experience
different meanings for same words. Thucydides gave this
incapacity to experience the same meaning for the same
words classic expression in his description of the civil war
in Corcyra-a description that is at the heart of Hobbes's
thinking, and, therefore, of our political understanding of
domestic political life.
The received value of names imposed for signification of
things, was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness, was counted true-hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be
wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re-advise for the
better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation.
He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried
such a one, was suspected. He that did insidiate, if it took, was
a wise man; but he that could smell out a trap laid, a more
dangerous man than he. But he that had been so provident as
not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary.
In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil
act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant
it, was commended.
Hobbes, however, was little concerned with war from
abroad, and especially with war from abroad that calls itself
sedition. He saw the threat to civil life as coming mainly
from within, and not from the exploitation of domestic discord as a cover for aggressive war. War from abroad that
wins an unwilling consent by calling itself sedition is something the twentieth century's incapacity to perceive events
has brought upon a world too unsure of itself to distinguish
the new from the merely self-destructive.
In contrast to the Peloponnesian War and Corcyra, however, the polarization today in free countries comes not
primarily from actual violence within the country but occurs in men's minds in response to war masking as civil
115
�violence elsewhere in the world, often in places no one
ever thought of much, before the ohset of fighting.
The division and polarization shOjVS itself not only be·
tween individuals but within them-' individuals who feel
torn between, in appearance, mutually exclusive interpre~
tations of all events. One man's hero is another's murderer.
Because we fear the responsibility of choosing, such a
division and polarization brings paralysis. And paralysis is
often a prelude to violence-or to helplessness in the face
of violence. Aristotle meant something like paralysis when
he used the word stasis for events which until recently
many called "revolution" in the illusion that their violence
brings movement and change instead of springing from
the incapacity for change.
This polarization in thinking would not work its way
into men's reasoning without the fear of the Soviet Union
and Communist China, mostly unacknowledged, behind
it. Lately, too, the Soviet Union has openly excited fear
with its threats of nuclear war, and, before that, with its
sponsorship of supposedly indigenous terrorists throughout the world-a sponsorship that governments even now,
with the exception of Italy and Israel, do not take seriously
because their awareness of it influences neither their
words nor their actions. 12 This open resort to terror is in
fact an attempt to bring the fear that reigns in totalitarian
count!ies to the whole world.
Propaganda always feeds on suppressed anger and fear.
Once people face the facts that inspire this unacknowledged fear, for instance the extermination in Afghanistan
and the use of gas in Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia,
the propaganda loses its grip-and men return to their
senses. Individuals and newspapers like the Wall Street
Journal, L'express, II Giornale Nuovo have driven governments to at least acknowledge Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, manipulation of the peace movements, use of gas in
Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia. In the face of sceptical
hostile journalists' questions about terrorism, the then
Secretary of State, Alexander M. Haig, referred to the
work of one private journalist, Claire Sterling. But especially in foreign affairs, governments are supposed to bring
men to their senses-not men their governments. We are
already in a situation that calls upon individuals to say
things their governments dare not acknowledge-the situation of individuals in totalitarian countries.
The last presidential election somewhat undid this tendency to polarization in thinking in the United Statesand also in free Europe-because it showed the capacity
of millions of individuals to come to their own conclusions,
to think with their own heads, despite the pounding and
manipulation of almost all major media. It made facts self- ·
evident that men had hardly dared mention in public a few
years before. There was, however, an immediate attempt
to reintroduce ideological stereotypes, like a drug that
some men, and especially some men who have come to
speak for the Democratic Party, could not get along with-
116
out. In somewhat veiled terms, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recently pleaded openly for this kind of polarization, even as
he scornfully admitted that Reagan's election has reasserted common sense perception and the meaning of
words enough to weaken the ideological rigidity that had
intensified polarization during the long years of South
Vietnam's and the United States' fight to save Indochina.
In the attempt to reintroduce this polarization, exploitation of the yearning for peace and the terror before nuclear death plays an important role, a role similar to the
"anti-war" movements more than ten years ago:
In foreign policy the administration has presided over the re-
militarization of the Cold War. [Soviet propaganda characterizes any Western attempt to defend itself as a reintroduction
of the Cold War.] It has conveyed the distinct impression that
it regards nuclear weapons as usable and nuclear war as winnable. Far from regarding the nuclear arms race as a threat to
the future of humanity, the administration appears to regard
it as the great means for doing the Soviets in.13
The government appears tongue-tied before this attempt to rewaken ideological thinking. It avoids straightforward facts and telling details and resorts to platitudes
that are barely distinguishable from ideology, and betrays
something approaching inverted agreement with those
who wish to undo it. This evasiveness bespeaks fear and
stirs the suspicion it would dispell. For instance, President
Reagan in his address on March 8, 1983, and on other occasions, exaggerated the effective exercise of American
strength in the years immediately after the Second World
War-the years that, unwittingly, made for the continuation of the war they meant to end, and thereby, increased
the chances for the collapse of the West that has to some
extent occurred.
The absence of a coherent peace, and the consequent
unacknowledged continuation of the war, meant we knew
what we were against but not what we were for. It meant
containment-the resignation to the perpetuation of the
division in the hope that it would end. The truth of the
matter is probably that nobody at the end of the War really
expected peace. For otherwise they would have thought
seriously about it. Because they did not expect it, they
asked only to be allowed to aspire to it.
The paralysis that first betrayed itself in this resignation
shows itself not only within countries but in the general
stagnation in international relations which some take for
"stability" -which, in turn, fosters stagnation in attitudes
that prevent the perception of facts, and their significance, at the moment of their occurrence.
Soviet propaganda speaks as if the truce in Europe and
the far East in 1945 had just occurred. And in some sense,
that is true-in the psychological sense. In the free countries the same old arguments are repeated from generation
to generation, but always as if they were new, the same
illusions reappear and must be dispelled. This repetition of
the same arguments responds unawares to the rigidity of
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Communist propaganda-and sometimes is actually occasioned and manipulated by Communist disinformation.l4
At the time of the Soviet attack on Afghanistan in December 1979, George Kennan explained Soviet aggression in
much the same terms that Forrestal in 1944 said hampered
American perception of Soviet aggression:
After a Socialist woman's attempt on Lenin's life on August 28, 1918, Radek, the Bolshevists' star writer, quoted
Lenin's ''winged words'' in Izvestia:
Even if ninety percent of the people perish, what matter if
the other ten percent live to see the revolution become universal?18
I find that whenever any American suggests that we act in
accordance with the needs of our own security he is apt to be
called a god-damned fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe
suggests that he needs the Baltic Provinces, half of Poland, all
of Bessarabia and access to the Mediterranean, all hands
agree that he is a fine, frank, candid and generally delightful
fellow who is very easy to deal with because he is so explicit in
what he wants.l5
In a world that thinks of itself as constantly on the move,
little changes-in perception and understanding. Again,
Forrestal in 1947 could be describing the situation today:
A few pages later in a somewhat different context Melgounov comments:
Not for nothing do the three capital letters which stand for
the title of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, of the
Che-Ka, stand also for the three Russian words which denote
"Death to every man." 19
In Afghanistan a few years ago, to the ignorance of almost all Western newspapers, an Afghan Communist in
charge of a prison echoed the Soviet words of 1918:
It looks to me as if the world were going to try to turn conservative but the difficulty is that between Hitler, your friends to
the east, and the intellectual muddlers who have had the
throttle for the last ten years, the practical people are going to
have a hell of a time getting the world out of receivership, and
when the miracles are not produced the crackpots may demand another chance in which to really finish the job. At that
time it will be of greatest importance that the Democratic
Party speaks for the liberals, but not for the revolutionaries. 16
But stagnation does not mean "stability"-it means drift
towards totalitarianism, drift for the most part unperceived.
And the stagnation does not go back to 1945 only. It
reaches back to 1917. Soviet actions to the world have not
changed since 1917 and early 1918. They are only an extension of the terror that began in 1917 and 1918 in Russia
to as much of the world as will not resist the methodical
resort to terror, sometimes not even disguised with hon-
eyed overtures of peace in the name of a spontaneous uprising for freedom. lri 1923 Guglielmo Ferrero said that
Russia had in four years suffered the distintegration that
had taken the ancient world four centuriesY In 1925 the
Russian historian, educated and trained in the world of
Nicholas II, Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, published The
Red Terror in Russia, in the major languages of Europe,
that described the atrocities of the Bolsheviks without uttering the word Marxist. But all that has been forgotten.
And because it has been forgotten we recall anything that
happens with difficulty.
The man who will read Melgounov will see the stagnation that surrounds him. He will see that the generations
have come and gone and that little has changed in Bolshevik practice since 1917, the practice that instructed Hitler
and showed him the world would ignore, and forget what
it did not ignore. The practice of getting others to do the
murdering for them, and still others to justify and exult in
it. The practice of blaming others for the murder they did
themselves: uThe Terror was forced upon us."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Their commander-in-chief was one Sayyed Abdollah. With
my own ears I heard him say: "A million Afghans only must
remain alive: we only need a million Communists: the others,
we don't need them, we will liquidate them.'' 20
Nothing has changed. The children shot today in Afghanistan are the descendants of the children shot in Russia in 1917-1918.21 The murder that went after almost
every person of noticeable energy and independence in
the countryside in South Vietnam by 1965-information
available in a book published in the United States in the
same year-went on in Russia beginning in 1917.22 There
was nothing spontaneous even then: it was cold and methodical. And why is it that murder, as long as it is spontaneous, seems alright to forget? The terror that wracked
Germany in the last years, and-almost unnoticed by the
rest of the world-wracks Italy now, that threatens the life
of every judge who dares condemn a terrorist, of every
courageous journalist, of the wives and children of prison
guards and wardens who do not cooperate-all that started
in 1917 in Russia with the seizure of wives and children as
hostages for shooting. And yet we, and our newspapers,
treat murder in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cambodia, or Italy,
when it is noticed at all, as if it had not happened before.
Neither are peace overtures at the moment of murder
anything new. For instance, the present Soviet peace overtures to Europe-together with threats of nuclear annihilation-meant to stop the American defense of Europe
with Pershing II and cruise missiles at the moment that
men and women drown in excrement and are buried alive
in Afghanistan.2l In 1917 and 1918 in Russia the shootings
never stopped on the nights before amnesties, the most
dreaded nights. And the greatest murder in Russia in 1917
and 1918 came with the aboliton of the death penalty.
When I think how few of these occurrences that ought
to be the currency of our thinking about the war called
peace figure in our memories, and contrast it with the hor-
117
�ror that grows with the years at thepmrder of five million
Jews and unumbered millions of others, I conclude that
only the destruction of fascism and nazism in war allows us
to experience its horrors after (and almost because) we can
do nothing about them. But we ignore the present murder, and the murder that preceded it, because we can do
something about it-if only not ignore it.
The resentment and hatred in much of the world at Israel's courage-that makes others perceive their cowardice-bespeaks a certain disingenousness in this horror at
past murders we can no longer do anything about. A disingenousness that serves to distract from present murder
and present cowardice and that shows itself nakedly in the
current Soviet and Arab propaganda that compares Israel
to the Nazis. Israel is one of the few nations in the world
that stands up to murderers, and takes words seriously,
that has learned the lessons of World War 11-the war that
does not cease.
But although the Communists have not changed since
1917, they have renewed themselves. They have returned
to their source as Machiavelli (Discourses 1, 3) said all republics and sects must. (But a regime that finds itself in
undermining the governments of the world, let alone its
endurance and renewal, was more than Machiavelli could
imagine.) First with the seizure of half of Europe and
China after the Second World War, and then with the
theft of Cuba-while the world wondered whether Castro
was really a "Communist"-and most lately with the undoing of many helpless and unwilling countries after the
fall of Saigon in April 1975: Cambodia, Laos, South
Yemen (in 1968), Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua. And Grenada in 1979. I almost forgot little Grenada
which lies on the oil routes through the Caribbean and
whose youths now go to Cuba six months every year for
indoctrination. The Communists helped precipitate the
destruction of the government of Lebanon in 1975 and of
the government of Persia in 1978. They are now fighting
to seize El Salvador and Afghanistan. And with each successive conquest there is less information and more lies.
And the world watches as if in a dream. It has been a rough
"short course" in the geography not learned in our renowned universities.
Each new conquest means a return to 1917-1918, and
reconfirms its lessons. To talk of the weakening of ideology in these circumstances is nonsense. Each conquest
strengthens it. Violence undoes the illusions and the beliefs of victims-but spreads the fear that makes for illusion and the lip-service to ideology in the rest of the world.
We are not getting farther away from 1917 as the years
pass on: it is approaching us. That is what I mean by stagnation-and what the Communists mean with their talk of
the inevitability of history.
Nineteen seventeen is nearer, because we cannot re~
member it, because we have less conception of what happened than men did in the early twenties. I do not mean
only the atrocities, but the simple facts. We still mindlessly
118
call October a Hrevolution", as if it were some popular up~
rising, instead of a few organized armed men's seizure of
a state. There is little understanding that the war, and the
collapse of the army in the face of peace propaganda, were
the decisive events-propaganda for peace, intenser and
more dangerous, but otherwise not unlike the outcry in the
United States and Europe during the Vietnam War.24
All the endless talk for more than two generations about
Hclass warfare," "the masses," "alienation," usocialism,"
the division of many intellectuals outside Russia into "Stalinists" and "Trotskyists", all this talk, this supposedly
"passionate" talk, that takes itself for philosophy, but is actually only verbiage, serves to obliterate the perception
and remembrance of these few fearful facts. And this incapacity to know the facts of the twentieth century reflects
itself also in a general incapacity to tell the story of our
times, to write simple narrative history in which living
statesmen count, and there is a reality to cope with. 25
And this incapacity to remember and see the facts leads
us to speak and even act as if we had adversaries worthy of
respect, as if they were partly right. We let communist regimes get away with murder. We do not even remind them
of it, and do not distinguish between these regimes and
their peoples. And the more they get away with murder,
the more they return to 1917, the more they can ignore
the nagging emptiness within. The force of this emptiness, and its fragility, shows itself in their denial of rejection, especially of the rejection of their agents and party
men:
My career in the KGB was developing successfully, and it
promised to be even better in the future. But my KGB and
party superiors did not know that for many years I was devel-
oping dissatisfaction with and finally total resentment of the
Soviet socialist system. When I was a university student I had
the chance to learn about the night~marish cruelty and atrocities of the Stalin regime which slaughtered up to 20 million
Soviet citizens. After graduating from the university and being transferred from one Central Committee, Communist
Party, Soviet Union affiliated organization to another, I wit·
nessed firsthand the fact that the Soviet socialist system was
not working for the good of its citizens. I came to the understanding that it is a totally corrupt dictatorship-type regime
with rotten moral standards. Most of the slogans put forward
by the Kremlin leaders I came to understand are aimed at de-
ceiving peoples of the U.S.S.R. and of the world. And I clearly
understand that Marxism-Leninism is actually a perverted
type of religion imposed on millions of people.
Over the past 3 years the Soviet authorities are progressively
using all ruthless and, even by Soviet law, illegal means to
force and blackmail my family to cooperate with them. The
main reason for the indescribable torture of my family by the
Soviet authorities is that the KGB is obviously under pressure to
present the Soviet Politburo with "proof' that the reasons for
my defection to the United States were not political. They cannot admit that a major in Soviet intelligence could possibly be a
hidden dissident.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Speaking about the Soviet Union, they have a problem, because my file in the KGB does not lead them to find anything
bad about me because there is nothing-it is impossible for
them. It is against the Soviet Communist rzature to admit that
a KGB major defected for political reasons. It just cannot happen by their ideas-they know that it can, but they cannot tell
that to the Politburo or the Russian people. (My emphasis)26
Tolstoy describes this emptiness in Napoleon, and the
dependence of its persistence on the approval of much of
the world. At Borodino for once the suffering of battle
breaks through to him. But he cannot yield to his feelings,
because of the praise of half the world. He orders the continuation of fire that he does not desire against Russians
who will not give way, because he thinks the world expects
it of him:
This day the horrible appearance of the battlefield overcame
that strength of mind which he thought constituted his merit
and his greatness . ... With painful dejection he awaited the
end of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human
feeling for a brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own person the
sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield. The
heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibil-
ity of suffering and death for himself. ...
Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire,
and for which he gave the order only because he thought it was
expected of him, was being done. And he fell back in that artificial realm of imaginary greatness, and again-as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing something for itself-he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role
predestined for him.
And not for the day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for
what was happening lay more than on all the others who took
part in it. Never to the end of his life could he understand
goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for
him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and
so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
(Emphasis mine)27
But the victory over Napoleon brought Europe a hundred years of stability because Talleyrand understood that
only the removal of Napoleon could dispel! the "artificial
phantasm" that was destroying the life of Europe in the
name of improving it, and persuaded Alexander I of it28 In
contrast, the First World War precipitated totalitarianism
in much of Europe, and the Second World War, dedicated
to its destruction, ended with its greatest advance. In contrast to the French revolution, which brought war to all of
Europe in the name of freedom, the First World War
brought totalitarianism in its aftermath.
There is in recent history a specific date for the renewal
of this emptiness' attack on the truth that began in 1917,
and for the West's collaboration with it, a date that showed
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that the capacity to tell the truth-without which no free
country could survive-was at the center of the struggle.
On April 16, 1943, the government of Poland in London
announced the discovery of bodies of "many thousands"
of Polish officers they suspected the Soviets had murdered
near Smolensk in the forest of Katyn. 29 Instead of supporting the Polish government which was eventually to have
ten divisions fighting in the West, the British and American governments tried to silence it. Stalin broke diplomatic relations with the government of Poland and started
the long diplomatic struggle for Poland that went on
throughout 1944 and which Churchill knew would decide
the fate of Germany and Europe, and, therefore, of the
peace.
A Hungarian Stalinist until he joined the uprising in
1956 that brought him his death, Miklos Gimlas described
this process of throttling the capacity to say, and understand, the obvious that has threatened many of the governments and newspapers of the world since 1917, and
that made a decisive advance in the long years of the war
for Indochina. Because they succumbed to, and even in
some instances encouraged, the frenzy in the United
States and Europe that took itself for passion that undid
that war, their words now ring hollow-the so-called "credibility gap":
Slowly we had come to believe ... that there are two kinds of
truth ... that truth of the Party and the people can be different and can be more important than the objective truth and
that truth and political expediency are in fact identical . ...
And so we arrived at the outlook ... which poisoned our
whole public life, penetrated the remotest corners of our
thinking, obscured our vision, paralysed our critical faculties
and finally rendered many of us incapable of simply sensing
or apprehending truth. This is how it was, it is no use denying
it.30
In just those years of the Indochina war the first authentic voices since 1917 from within Russia broke upon the
world, and showed its startled eyes that the capacity to tell
the truth, which had made Russian art one of the centers
of Europe in the nineteenth century, had survived the socalled Russian revolution, that Russia still lived, that
things were at the same time worse than we had known,
and better than we had imagined in that abandoned country. At the same time that the West succumbed to an onslaught of lies, voices in the east dismissed them with a
sureness that made us blush at the obvious we desired to
deny-and did deny. Loudly, because we knew it to be undeniable. But the Indochina war ended with the first major Soviet advances throughout the world since the seizure
of eastern Europe in 1945.
These voices embarrass much of the West because they
remind it of its evasiveness and willing blindness. Almost a
generation ago, Michael Polanyi described this incapacity
to face simple facts, and draw their consequences, in
words that tell even more today:
119
�Many academic experts will refuse'· to recognize today that
mere thirst for truth and justice has 1 caused the revolts now
transforming the Soviet Countries. They are not Marxists,
but their views are akin to Marxism in Claiming that the scien·
tific explanation of history must be based on more tangible
forces than the fact that people change their minds3l
This incapacity to cope with the truth, and tell it, makes
it difficult for free governments to explain their policies
and even sometimes to enjoy the confidence of their
actions. There is no way to act effectively in free countries
without straightforward explanation of actions. For action
needs the test of public explanation to win natural assurance. During the war in Vietnam, the United States did
much of what was necessary, but did not dare justify it or
say it openly, did not dare know what it was doing. The
government was simply not able to find the words to ex·
plain its actions. This incapacity to explain its actions
amounted almost to acting publicly in secret. This evasiveness not only bred suspicion, but undid confidence both in
the government and finally in the people, who for many
years lent the government a confidence it turned out not
to have. It also kept the government from realizing that it
did not have a strategy for winning. That even today the
word Winning" sounds uncomfortable is a measure of our
past evasiveness. The government lost the war with words,
not on the battlefield, because it did not understand its
actions enough to explain them. A Soviet commentator, in
contrast, understood its actions very well, precisely because he did not have to suffer the test of public explanation:
11
I really tore the stupid Americans to shreds this morning ... I
held them up to shame for escalating the War in Vietnam.
What idiots they are in Washington! Rotten humanists in
white gloves! They want to hold Communism back, the fools.
But it doesn't have to be stopped; it needs to be squashed.
But they don't understand, not a damned thing! The only fellow they ever had who understood what a cowardly bunch of
jackals all these Stalins and Khrushchevs and Maos and Hos are
was John Foster Dulles, may his soul rest in peace. He knew
you can talk with Communists pleasantly and politely, just
as long as you hold a gun to their heads. Then they are quiet
and peaceful, as smooth as can be. But any other approach is
useless ...
I read all these people like Alsop, Lippmann, and Pearson,
and not one of these pundits is smart enough to say straight
out: Tell the Russians to go to hell and get on with the job in
Vietnam. The Russians won't dare to raise a finger against
you. They're scared to death. And the Chinese won't touch
you either. But they'll make a terrible lot of noise. All you
have to do is snap back at them properly and quietly, as
Dulles did, and they'll shut up. They'll be begging for peace
themselves. How stupid life is. We can't write what we think
but they can't do what we think either. They are afraid of their
own left-wingers. I've been there, I know. (My emphasis)32
This incapacity to explain action publicly, and, therefore, more often than not, to understand it privately with
120
any confidence, leads to an incapacity to understand the
significance of action. To understand the importance of
acts, especially in a situation where the threat of total war
is constant and, therefore, unreal, and "little" wars continue regardless-and where the fighting is far away and
engages only the Soviets or their proxies directly-you
have to go to the books about the camps. They are the only
books of manners, of diplomacy, we have-our Odyssey.
The first rule of the camps is, pay attention to actions, not
words-one's own actions and the actions of others:
Only dimly at first, but with ever greater clarity, did I also
come to see that soon how a man acts can alter what he is.
Those who stood up well in the camps became better men,
those who acted badly soon became bad men; and this, or at
least so it seemed, independent of their past life history and
their former personality make-up or at least those aspects of
personality that seemed significant in psychoanalytic thinking. 33
Diplomats should now go to the books on the camps to
learn what they are up against in dealing with totalitarian
regimes. For our world no longer has any strangers, or,
at least, no longer knows how to recognize and greet a
stranger. And in the camps there are no strangers-and
everybody knows it unmistakably.
In their concentration camps totalitarian regimes betray
the desperation that possesses them, and that informs
their actions among the nations: in their readiness to allow
criminals to victimize the innocent captives, in their resort
to terror, including threats to relatives and friends still outside, to make men do anything to survive, above all in their
effort to prove there is no such thing as courage, that life is
merely existence, to destroy men without directly killing
them, to make them scared of the breath they breathe.
And all this not swiftly but in a long drawn-out cunning
cat-and-mouse game that raises expectations and crushes
them, that exploits the yearning to survive (at the price of
betraying all one is), and the illusion that one might just be
different from the dead and dying, to turn a man into an
apparently willing victim, because his will-and his lifehave shrunk almost beyond his experience. Melgounov
was already clear in 1925 about this slowness:
Besides, the policy of the Soviet Government is a policy capa·
ble always of postponing its wreakings of revenge, so that persons may "disappear", may be sent into exile, or thrown in
gaol, long after they have been granted official guarantees of
immunity. 34
Melgounov mentions no countries-in addition to individ-
uals-because he did not imagine that the violence consuming Russia might spread to the world. All this slowness, especially the exploitation of the wish to survive at
almost any cost, has betrayed itself in the fear of war that
has obsessed the West since 1917. More than twenty years
passed before the Communists finally struck South Vietnam openly.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Terror and destruction appear to wprk. Few can cope
with them without wreaking equal destruction-Indochina was an important exception-in return, destruction
that usually works to the advantage of tfuose who want to
destroy.
The camps teach that there is no "negotiation" without
hard-headed courage, and the strength that comes of it,
that does not lead to irremediable surrender in which the
victim, individual or country, is made to consent to his
own destruction, which wants to change man, to reach his
core, but which destroys many, and discovers unexpected
strength in some.
Who knows whether it is not in man's lack of an internal core
that the mysterious success of the New Faith and its charm
for the intellectual lie? By subjecting man to pressure, the
New Faith creates this core, or in any case the feeling that it
exists. Fear of freedom is nothing more than fear of the void.
"There is nothing in man," said a friend of mine, a dialecti~
cian. "He will never extract anything out of himself, because
there is nothing there. You can't leave the people and write in
a wilderness. Remember that man is a function of social
forces. Whoever wants to be alone will perish." This is proba-
bly true, but I doubt if it can be called anything more than the
law for our times. Feeling that there was nothing in him,
Dante could not have written his Divine Comedy or Montaigne his Essays, nor could Chardin have painted a single
still-life. Today man believes there is nothing in him, so he
accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to
find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone. As
long as he believes this, there is little one can reproach in his
behaviour. 35
The emptiness Milosz means is Baudelaire's ennui. It
means not being able to taste life, not feeling alive, not being alive. "Whoever wants to be alone will perish." But
whoever does not stand alone will not live. People who
cannot feel life, whose words have no meaning, feel that
there is a wall between them and life, that there is no core.
The incapacity to experience life, to feel alive, makes people feel as miserable as poverty-and, ashamed. They
wince in envy at individuals who can feel these things. In
free countries envy tortures all the more, because it is clear
that nothing keeps one from life except oneself: there is
nobody to blame.
Totalitarian ideology promises to dispel such emptiness,
but totalitarian states simply crush anything that is not
empty. They murder and persecute individuals not possessed by it. It is the insistence on this emptiness, on proving that there is nothing else, nothing that can stand up to
it, that drives totalitarian regimes to expand. For free
countries excite murderous envy, because they remind totalitarian regimes that everyone might not be empty, that
there might be men who can say "no," who might love life
enough not to do anything to survive. But baffled by their
freedom that mercilessly drives them to experience their
incapacity to live, the free countries, for the most part,
cannot conceive that anybody could envy them:
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
... very many people: living in totalitarian countries, having
survived terror and been brainwashed by propaganda, are not
only genuinely content with their position, but virtually consider themselves to be the happiest people on earth. This,
however, engenders an inferiority complex vis-3.-vis the democracies, so that the inhabitants of totalitarian countries often turn into implacable enemies of freedom, ready and willing to destroy everything that reminds them of the free will
they have lost. This also applies in many respects to the intellectuals of those countries, who often display a pathological
fear of freedom.
A man who has been accustomed to breathing fresh air all his
life does not notice it, and never realizes what a blessing it is.
He thinks of it only occasionally when entering a stuffy room,
but knows that he need only open the window for the air to
become fresh again. A man who has grown up in a democratic
society and who takes the basic freedoms as much for granted
as the air he breathes is in much the same position. People
who have grown up under democracy do not value it highly
enough. Yet there are weighty reasons for their dissatisfaction with this society .... 36
This reluctance to take their own measure that makes it
difficult for the free countries to realize that the totalitarian regimes are murderously envious of their freedom-in
some sense experience it more deeply than the free countries because they have deprived themselves of it-makes
it difficult for them to experience communist hypocrisy
and duplicity. At the end of the war some experienced the
West's incapacity to perceive Communist duplicity more
vividly than now:
The sheer duplicity of the Soviets during these negotiations is
beyond the experience of the experts in the State Department, with the result that any future promise made by the
Soviets is to be evaluated with great caution. It appears that
they do not mind lying or even our knowing that they lie, as
long as it is for the benefit of the state_37
Perception of totalitarian duplicity would lead to awareness that the Communist regimes speak in a different dimension, that the same words mean different things to
them, in the precise sense that the same words meant different things at Corcyra. This double vision in which the
relation to world and self, and of language to truth, is at
stake, is precisely the disturbance in perception that I
mentioned in the introduction which betrays itself in the
division of the West and feeds upon it-and makes it difficult for us to distinguish between our friends and enemies:
30 Aprill947 Jimmy Byrnes came in this morning and in talking about the Russians he said they are "stubborn, obstinate
and they don't scare." I reminded him of our conversation
about two years ago when he chided me for being too extreme in my views about the Russians when I told him that
[when] he harbored the illusion that he could talk in the same
fashion with the Russians that he could with the Republican
opposition in the Senate he was very much mistaken. At that
time I told him that when he spoke so to speak, using language
121
�in a third dimension, the Russians spoke in a fourth, and there
1
was no stairway. 38
The dissociation of words from facts, which makes it impossible to grasp the meaning of events until afterwards,
when nothing can be done about them, results from not
perceiving totalitarian duplicity, and the incommensurability of vision that comes with it. Such dissociation and
double vision makes people helpless before aggression.
Brezhnev in 1973 meant just this dissociation when he
called for "cooperation" between the two sides despite
their incapacity to talk to each other-as if they were interchangeable, and the truth did not separate them:
For years we have been piling up arms without interruption.
Until now we can destroy each other many times over, not
simply once. Why not persuade our people to work together,
even if we hold ideological positions, we will perhaps never be
able to reconciliate?39
One of the New York Times correspondents in Indochina, Sydney Schanberg, experienced this double vision
in his own flesh when he could not recognize the revolution of his dreams in the murder before his eyes, patients
left to die on the operating table and the rest, in Cambodia
in the spring of 1975 after the fall of Saigon:
... In almost every situation we encountered during the
more than two weeks we were under Communist control,
there was a sense of split vision~ whether to look at events
through Western eyes or through what we thought might be
Cambodian revolutionary eyes.
Brutality or Necessity?
Was this just cold brutality, a cruel and sadistic imposition of
the law of the jungle, in which only the fittest will survive? Or
is it possible that, seen through the eyes of the peasant soldiers and revolutionaries, the forced evacuation of the cities is
a harsh necessity? Perhaps they are convinced that there is no
way to build a new society for the benefit of the ordinary
man, hitherto exploited, without literally starting from the beginning; in such an unbending view people who represent the
old ways and those considered weak or unfit would be ex-
pendable and would be weeded out. Or was the policy both
cruel and ideological? (My emphasis)40
Because totalitarian leaders see the freedom of the West
with more clarity than much of the West, they desire to
undermine and destroy it with the free West's involuntary
cooperation and consent-to exploit the West's fear of its
own self-destructiveness, that showed itself in the First
World War and in the decade before the Second World
War, to turn it against itself. To win this unwilling cooperation they exploit the West's unacknowledge guilt at going
along with the cat-and-mouse game of murderers ever
since 1917.
The United States now goes along with this cat-andmouse game in El Salvador. Intelligent and honest journalists, who do not know much history, observe rightly that
122
the United States contributes to the polarization it might
have prevented with the swiftness of confidence-which
they do not, however, call for:
It was certainly possible to describe some members of the
armed opposition, as Deane Hinton had, as "out-and-out
Marxists/' but it was equally possible to describe other members of the opposition, as the embassy had at the inception of
the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FOR) in April of 1980,
as "a broad-based coalition of moderate and center left
groups." The right in El Salvador never made this distinction:
to the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist, along
with most of the American press, the Catholic church, and, as
time went by, all Salvadoran citizens not of the right. In other
words there remained a certain ambiguity about political
terms as they were understood in the United States and in El
Salvador, where "left" may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared. That it
comes eventually to mean something else may be, to the extent that the United States has supported the increasing polarization in El Salvador, the procustean bed we made ourselves.41
Violence, in appearance random, in which, in contrast
to outright war, you never really know who you are fighting, makes for the "ambiguity of political terms" that Joan
Didion talks of. Because the United States will neither pull
out entirely or move decisively, the violence goes on and
on, and the propaganda war spreads throughout the world
in the doubts of men. To prolong means to lose, because it
means to prolong uncertainty and to increase the "mixed
signals" from the United States the El Salvadorans complain of, rightly. The continuation of violence means that
men, especially men outside the country ofviolence, will
want most of all an end to it. It means victory for the few,
weaker and more violent, who will destroy freedom in El
Salvador. The focus on El Salvador that comes of going
along with this cat-and-mouse game also keeps the United
States from lifting its eyes to the real threat and instigator,
Cuba, and to the danger to Mexico-from seeing the
whole situation in the Caribbean, and in the world.
The cat-and-mouse game feeds off dread of the "Right,"
of fascism and nazism. But it may actually in the slow unceasing course of defeat provoke the brutality it dreadsas a young writer observed in profound criticism of the
President of Yale's recent outburst against the "Moral Majority":
Neither your Address, nor any other manifestations of liberal
Democrat culture take notice of the real dangers to the
United States, such as the latest measures of Soviet militarization, like the abolition of military draft deferment for college
students or the creation of military bases in Afghanistan for
advancing further into the Middle East. But these real dangers exist, they will really grow, they will produce real fear,
and on this fear real fascists or Nazis will capitalize. 42
And this may be just what Soviet policy wants-in spite of
itself.
WJNTER/SPRING 1983
�2 The Roots of the Division in the Past
I have described how the division betrays itself in politics since 1945, in the division of the world, in the division
of Germany and of countries like Korea, and in the polarization of thinking, and the excitation of irreconcilable factions within free countries, and within individuals within
those countries, and of the workings of this division, of
how it turns countries against themselves and individuals
against themselves, of how it increases the forces within
an individual that paralyze him in the name of freeing him
from them.
But this division that shows itself most startlingly in politics since 1945, goes much deeper than politics. It tends to
politicize all life. Even in Italian elementary schools and
high schools factionalism that calls itself "Left" and
"Right" holds sway-a telling indication of the adults' incapacity to speak to each other. 43
The politicization shows itself most tellingly in the politicization of freedom, in its equation with democracy, in
the incapacity to conceive of democratic constitutions
springing from freedom, rather than freedom springing
from democratic constitutions. The astonishing, fairly current, assertion that the greatest achievements in art, philosophy, and the writing of history have occurred in democracies shows this parochialism in its nakedness.
In the paradox of contradiction, the war now abroad
means to destroy constitutions in the name of directly realizing this freedom that politicization devours. For it hates
democratic constitutions for their modesty, for their readiness to build on this freedom, and yet measure their distance from it. For these constitutions with their checks
and balances, their respect for opposition, their due process, their dedication to law and justice above all expediency, express both our yearning for freedom and our inca-
pacity for realizing it, directly. In its genius the American
constitution bases its confidence in men on a distrust of
their natures, and, therefore, distinguishes what men do
from what they think, say, and desire. It, therefore, makes
men experience their disatisfaction with themselves-the
difference between their good opinion of themselves and
their actual self.
Art and philosophy and the writing of history, when
they are not propaganda masquerading as art, have always
been greater than politics and free constitutions, have always shown their foundation in nature and in living man,
in the freedom that is greater than constitutions and underlies them. In this sense art and philosophy and history
are silent. They do not incite to action, but allow one to
experience the springs of action, life itself, in another dimension of make believe and recall.
The shrinking of freedom within political bounds that
corresponds to its containment within the frontiers of a
few countries, shows itself in unmistakable terms in the
emptiness of much of what passes for art, philosophy, and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
history-and in its unacknowledged politicization, and in
the public's fascination with it and incapacity to distinguish it from actual art. Substitute the word "communism" for "sex" in many novels written today, and they
will betray the yearning to incite to action, with the most
powerful stimulants, characteristic of propaganda, the
ideological drive to obliterate the obvious, the self-evident,
the lovely plainness of the day-as Lev Navrozov has observed.
In contrast our great art-and we have some-is above
all unassuming, unassuming enough to undo pretension
and masks, and make you blush. The plainness of our
humdrum existences which leaves little space for anything
but life, whether lived or not, escapes and baffles like a
new Circe everything but this unassumingness which
bears no pretence and makes no show, and seems, and in
some sense is, effortless-which does not mean it comes
without struggle. Above all it knows that the most important things come unasked. I am thinking, for example, of
Montale, Morandi, the Grass of Onkel, Onkel, Godard,
and Truffaut. In Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus it
moves even in the camps, for the book is made up of the
author's letters from the camps-in a world that, at least in
the West, writes few letters for other than official purposes. In some sense no real story can now be told on the
unmistakable level of art without this unassumingness
that recalls the simplicity of nature, and is the only
strength we have that is undeniable. Nadezhda Mandelstarn in Hope against Hope showed Stalin's unmistakable
smell for this unassumingness, and his refusal to give up
the scent until he destroyed it.
Besides showing itself in art, philosophy, and the writing
of history, the mirrors of the soul, this freedom greater
than democracy lives in individuals, in the lives they lead,
in the language they speak, which bears all history in it,
which is always greater than the meanings it shows, which
always shows life rediscovering its meanings, and, therefore, always surprises-all living that in happy times goes
on untouched by politics. Because this freedom lives in individuals, and in some sense begins with them, the war
now going on aims at destroying all individuals capable of
experiencing freedom and, therefore, nature to some extent. Igor Shafarevich meant this destruction when he
wrote " ... socialist ideals must (bring) . . . the withering
away of all mankind, and its death.":
... the economic and social demands of socialism are the
means for the attainment of its basic aim, the destruction of
individuality.
... Such a revolution would amount to the destruction of
Man, at least in the sense that has hitherto been contained in
this concept. And not just an abstract destruction of the concept, but a real one toa.44
To the extent that the world-wide war to destroy freedom has made freedom smaller than democracy, which
123
�can only spring from it and realize it within limitations,
and allow individuals to realize it, but which cannot create
it, for it already lives, and we know its presence even in its
partial absence, totalitarianism has already succeeded.
Because individuals realize the attack is against them,
and that their governments are in some sense complicit
with it, just as they themselves are complicit with it, they
tend to be distrustful rather than critical of their democratic governments and of themselves-a distrust that like
the shrinking of freedom shows the success of totalitarianism has no geographical frontiers, because it has no sovereignty, because it subdues all life within its own frontiers
and, therefore, must feed on life without.
But this struggle against totalitarianism that has subordinated freedom to politics, and threatens the individual, is
in a sense simply a byproduct of the First World War and
of the incapacity to understand and end it. Unlike the wars
of Napoleon whose armies attempted to bring the French
Revolution to all of Europe, the First World War did not
begin as a total revolutionary war. It began as a conventional war which surprised everybody.lt turned into a total
war because nobody understood it. And its very uncontrollability, which came of this incapacity to understand it,
and which betrayed itself in enormous casualties, turned it
into a revolutionary war in 1917, for the betterment of humanity, to justify those casualties. In 1917 to keep its soldiers in the trenches, the Italian government promised
them a new world. 45 1917 also brought the Fourteen
Points, and the veneration of Wilson's picture almost like
an icon in much of Europe. The First World War was not
born of the revolution. It unleashed it.
The men who defeated Napoleon did not only know
what they were against. They knew what they were for.
They knew concretely enough what they were for, for Talleyrand to explain to Alexander I that there could be no
peace without the removal of Napoleon from power, and
restoration of monarchy in France. In contrast, the men of
1914 so little understood what they were about that they
allowed a war they had not understood to turn into a total
war against all governments-that is, into a war against
themselves.
Because revolution, the war against governments that
sets individuals against each other and against themselves,
came after and as a result of the First World War, became
the content of the First World War after the fighting on
the fronts ceased, because the war produced revolutions,
and not the revolutions the war, the division of the West
precedes the struggle against totalitarianism, and underlies it, and is deeper than it.
In 1918 in a remarkable work, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Thomas Mann clearly grasped the underlying
meaning of the struggle that had rent Europe, and sensed
that the incapacity to grasp it, that betrayed itself in 1918
in the flight into principles that masked disrespect for the
defeated in their desire to change them, would also make
it impossible to experience the tragedy that gripped Eu-
124
rope, both victors and defeated, and, therefore, to end the
war in peace:
... Berufen sein, sei es zu einem Wissen oder einer Tat, zu
der man nicht geboren ist, das schien mir immer der Sinn der
Tragischen-und wo Tragik ist, darf Liebe sein. 46
The First World War represented a renewal of Rome's
struggle against the world in antiquity and in the sixteenth
century which Germany had resisted:
Der lmperialismus der Zivilisation ist die letzte Form des
roemischen Vereinigungsgedankens, gegen den Deutschland
protestiert . .. 47
For Thomas Mann in 1918 it was clear that the accidental war had been about something real and almost palpable, his own living and all the world he had known-and
that because it had been about something real, neither the
defeated not the victors could be entirely right.
Mann saw the First World War as a struggle between
France and Germany, between France that embodied the
principles of the French Revolution, and Germany and
the German-speaking world, and probably also Russia
(which an accident of diplomacy had put on the side of the
Allies). He understood that total war had distorted France
as much as Germany, for total war tends to obliterate the
differences between victors and defeated.
Germany stood for art as opposed to "literature"-the
novels that led Madame Bovary to destruction-for work
in distinction to employment, for culture as opposed to
civilization, for authority as opposed to liberty, which he
distinguished from freedom, for feeling as opposed to principle, for philosophy, for freedom as opposed to democracy, which tended to spread politics everywhere, and after the French Revolution, had brought war to all of
Europe. By art as opposed to "literature," he meant an art
that was greater than politics, and which taught its readers
the limits of politics. He dared even to write that he had
hoped Germany would win the war.
But the greatness of Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen
comes in the awareness that breathes throughout it that
this world is gone forever, and that its disappearance will
have consequences. It is a book full of the sense of loss,
and, therefore, full of sorrow and depth, a warm depth
whose profoundity does not frighten. Betrachtungen eines
Unpolitischen is as much a farewell to Germany as Buddenbrooks was a farewell to his parents and his family, and
Lubeck and the world of the Hanseatic cites. From now on
he would be on his own without a past in a world that was
on its own.
The time of wandering in which all were homeless had
begun-the time in which men no longer knew how to
greet a stranger, and, therefore tell the difference between
a stranger and friend, in which men no longer wrote letters, in which all knew the devastating loneliness of losing
oneself in a crowd, in which a great deal of cash no longer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�meant wealth, in which great cities assured anonymity,
and the elites of the world lived as if in villages, in which
the country of the homeless would inherit the defense of
what was left of a Europe that could not defend itself, in
which love would be called sex, and blushes feared, in
which egalitarianism was taken for the simplicity of nature, in which any difference smote the heart with something like the pangs of unrequited love, in which envy
would be taken for enthusiasm, in which few could conceive less was more 1 in which you wrote books because you
feared to speak your mind to your neighbour, in which
plain good sense would be taken for untutored naivete, in
which gradually artists disappeared and all men became
"artists," in which everything had to be learned in school,
in which men thought they were the first in history to
make love, in which men protested against death, in which
shame's place in nature was beyond imagination.
1918 was probably the last year Mann could have written such a book Later he praised democracy, because it
was all that was left, and never with anything like the
depth of his farewell to the world of his youth. For after
1918 you could no longer address individuals without exciting crowds, without inspiring the passions that made
things worse in the name of making them better, without
provoking the politics that seduced individuals to their
death by promising to do for them what they could not do
for themselves.
You had to get along with what was left-that is what
Mann's farewell meant. But getting along with what was
left meant knowing the consequences of destruction. It
meant that in the future Europe would live only in individuals wandering and alone throughout the world in a silence that told of embarrassment at great works and at
greatness itself, and that took any inadvertent sign of lifefrom which all art springs-as something untoward:
... Ich sprach von europaeischer Verhunzung: Und wirklich,
unserer Zeit gelang es, so vieles zu verhunzen: Das Nationale,
den Sozialismus-den Mythos, die Lebensphilsophie, das Irrationale, den Glauben, die Jugend, die Revolution und was
nicht noch alles. Nun denn, sie brachte uns auch die Verhunzung des grossen Mannes. Wir muessen uns mit dem historischen Lose abfinden, das Genie auf dieser Stufe seiner Offenbarungs-moeglichkeit zu erleben_48
About twenty years after Mann's Betrachtungen, Kafka
understood clearly that the separation of feelings from understanding that the principles of the victors had helped
bring about-and against which Thomas Mann had said
Germany had always protested-had brought about the
demonization of feelings that might destroy the very
things they would have preserved when not divorced from
understanding. By feelings Kafka meant, I think, the wild,
and quite passionless, indignation that drove political
propaganda, and threatened to undermine the little authority that remained in government and individuals.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
... One ought not to provoke people. We live in an age which
is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to
do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a
crime. War and revolution haven't ceased to rage. On the
contrary. The freeing of our feelings stokes their fires.49
Mann knew that something real had been destroyed.
And because something real had been destroyed, and because men did not realize it had been destroyed, the destruction, the war, would continue, even as the protests of
desperation against it increased. This destruction pretended to free the core of man, that showed itself in the
capacity to say "yes" or uno," but actually it sought to de~
stray this core, to paralyze the capacity to say "yes" or
"no," to destroy the living, the capacity to live. It did this
by turning life itself into politics, into propaganda that
drove people into ecstasy with its promises to change human nature.
When Mann realized that there could be no peace after
1917 because neither defeated nor victors could admit
they had been both right and wrong in the traditions of
eighteenth century law, he meant the disappearance of
doubt in international relations, the doubt that finds remarkable description in the late Richard Hofstadter's
sketch of the qualities that make for art and philosophy:
It is, in fact, the ability to comprehend and express not only
different but opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas that gives rise to first~rate work in all areas of
humanistic expression and in many fields of inquiry.50
The democracies recognized this doubt, that is ultimately
the doubt, and the questioning that comes of it, of Socrates, in their recognition of opposition and criticism in their
domestic life. But after 1917 it no longer held any sway in
international life where victors and defeated could no
longer admit they were both right and wrong. Instead they
wanted a rigidity they took for assurance-a rigidity which
robbed them of confidence and made them fear themselves, and which made them weak in peace and harsh in
war, and which finally obliterated the distinction between
peace and war.
But this rigidity in international relations which brings
with it the destruction of traditional international law (ius
gentium)-the Germans were not even invited to the
peace negotiations after the First World War-cannot but
slowly paralyze the doubt within the domestic life of free
countries. It shows its stiffening effect in the spread of ideologies, and the polarization they bring, within free countries. For this doubt to live within countries, it must also
show itself outside of them in the recognition of the uncertainty of relations between nations, which allows the continuation of present friendships, because it recognizes that
the friends of today might be the enemies of tomorrowand the enemies of today, the friends of tomorrow. 51 This
recognition of uncertainty means the recognition of the
125
�differences between nations, which, in turn, brings the
recognition that freedom is bigger than constitutions, and,
therefore, does not require similar constitutions everywhere, that some peoples can live' in freedom without
spelling their freedom out in written documents, that freedom is old, slavery new. In his characteristically sententious remark at Yalta that the wars of the twentieth century unlike other wars allowed the victors to impose their
political systems on the defeated, Stalin meant the opposite of living with this uncertainty. 52 But this uncertainty
inspired the traditional law of nations (ius gentium), which
is older than almost all nations now living, and which knew
it lived precisely because it sought its assurance, not in the
written guarantee of treaties, but in the threat of war for
violation of traditional practice-for instance, the seizure
of ambassadors, something the Persians did at their peril
in the nineteenth century.
The incapacity to settle the war with a real peace, which
brought the defeated as well as the victors to the peace
table, blurred the distinction between victors and defeated, precisely because a real peace would have meant
recognizing their differences, and the differences in their
political traditions. It would have meant not destroying
the institution of the Kaiser, or at least realizing the serious consequences of its destruction. It would have meant
understanding the risks involved in undoing the empires.
It took more than a generation and much disaster to make
the world understand that the destruction of governments
prolongs a war instead of ending it, because legitimate governments do not grow up overnight:
July 29, 1945 ... He (Ernest Bevin, Foreign Minister of Great
Britain) then made a rather surprising statement-for a liberal and a labor leader: "It might have been far bett~r for all of
us not to have destroyed the institution of the Kaise.~after the
last war; we might not have had this one if we hadn't 'done so.
It might have been far better to have guided the Germans to a
constitutional monarchy rather than leaving them without a
symbol and therefore opening the psychological doors to a
man like Hitler . .. " 53
The blurring of the distinction between victors and defeated showed itself in the collapse of governments among
both the defeated and victorious. For Italy, which Mussolini seized by bluff in 1922, and Russia, at least until
Kerensky, had been victors in the war with Germany. And
the collapse of France in 1941, in face of the might that
came of the collapse of the democracy that defeat had imposed on Germany, should also probably be included in
this list. This collapse of governments among both defeated and victors shows the war had overwhelmed both.
In a sense the story of the two decades between the wars
is the story of how victors and defeated undid each other
in unwilling cooperation. Defeat is a serious business. It
should teach the victors modesty of aims. The extent that
the war had overcome both defeated and victors showed
itself also in the victors' blindness to the significance of the
126
failure of democracy in Italy, and then in Germany. Nations who had persuaded themselves they had fought the
war for democracy ought to have been profoundly alarmed
at the collapse of these governments-not to speak of the
collapse of the Tsar, and a few months later, of the justborn democracy in Russia in 1917. Blindness to the significance of the failure of democracy in Italy, and later in Germany, led to complicity with the regimes that replaced
them. And this sense of complicity paralyzed the democracies in the face of their aggressions. In some sense nazism
and fascism and communism were the creatures of the victors who had not known the responsibilities of victory:
If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of
Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential
dupes of every adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or
religion, who would appeal to their emotions and promise
them private gains which he neither could procure them nor
even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could
have been discovered.
... The British government, behind all its disguises, had dedared itself a partisan of Fascist dictatorship.
... I am writing a description of the way in which those
events (the English government's unstated policy of undermining the government of the Republic of Spain and the governments of Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia) impinged upon
myself and broke up my pose of detached professional
thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my
youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of dear
thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my
life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle,
fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall
fight in the daylight. 54
Those are famous words of Collingwood's in 1939. But
governments had started teaching this confusion to their
citizens long before. In a letter on February 15, 1918,
Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, argued strongly
against giving money to the Bolsheviks in an assessment
that even to today sounds raw and outspoken because of
its accuracy:
.. . Mr. Walling had a keen appreciation of the forces which
are menacing the present social order in nearly every European country and which may have to be reckoned with even
in this country. It is really a remarkable analysis of the dangerous elements which are coming to the surface and which are
in many ways more to be dreaded than autocracy; the latter is
despotism but an intelligent despotism, while the former is a
despotism of ignorance. One at least has the virtue of order,
while the other is productive of disorder and anarchy. It is a
condition which cannot but arouse the deepest concern. 55
Despite this advice, a few days later on March 11, 1918,
Woodrow Wilson, unwilling or unable to distinguish the
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�violence in Russia from his own promises of democracy to
the world-promises made in 1917 to give the fighting
meaning-wrote encouraging words to the Soviet Congress:
... The whole heart of the people of the United States is with
the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever
from autocratic government and become the masters of their
own life. 56
Wilson's measureless aspirations wished to dispell the
memory of the hatreds shown the world in allied wartime
propaganda. But they matched this hatred in fierceness.
Their measurelessness also made them difficult to distinguish from the measureless aspirations of those out to destroy all government that continued the hatred of the war
in the ostensible repudiation of it. Both the builders and
destroyers of governments meant to repudiate the past, including the immediate past of the Great War. There were
to be new times-times the world had never seen before.
They repudiated the past because the past embarassed
them. But this embarassment measured only their shame
for the present. They shrunk from the past, because they
would not know they were ashamed of the present. Underneath this measurelessness that came of shame for a
present that was beyond coping, and that was so difficult
to distinguish from "revolutionary" fervour, and was in
some sense its complement, there was always fear of war,
and the suspicion of governments that comes of the fear of
war-enough combined to weaken any government.
It was almost as if the world no longer knew how to
mourn the dead only to forget them. It did not realize that
continuing the war in the measurelessness of aspirations
meant not mourning, not feeling sorrow. And that not sorrowing meant forever the leaden guilt at so much massacre whose incomprehensibility had undermined the confidence of statesmen everywhere, made them incapable of
concluding an effective peace, and undone the word courage-a guilt that no amount of freneticizing about the future would dispel. There has been perhaps no time with
greater cause for sorrow that sorrowed less. The past
stopped in 1917.
But the appeal to measureless aspiration to give meaning to the slaughter did not only bring the past to a stop. It
nourished the suspicion that violence brought progress,
made the world better, that it might be the only way to
change things. For the measureless aspiration for peace
and a new world meant man had changed, and the only
change that men knew had come of violence, now called
"revolution" instead of war, because the word "revolu-
tion" excited hope, war dread. And it tells something
a bout these measureless aspirations that almost every
country that totalitarianism seized first went through democracy.
The belief that violence brought progress made the suspicion that men had done intolerable damage to themselves intolerable. It banished prudence, common-sense,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sobriety, and most of all pessimism, all words hardly anyone dared show in public, whose meaning men no longer
knew-or dared conceive-except darkly, and in the silence of their own minds, a silence that the deafening roar
of aspiration in all public places made men fearful of trusting. Everything, but above all disaster, became the occasion for exuberance that men mistook for hope-just as
they took their sentimentality, especially the sentimental
whining for peace, for goodwill. But unlike hope and sorrow and goodwill, this exuberance and sentimentality despite its illusion of energy made men helpless in the face of
those who used the same exuberence and sentimentality
to undo them. Because of its measurelessness it made it
hard to grasp obstacles that would have shown their aspirations their limitations and, therefore, increased the responsibilities of the victors by facing them with the choice
between what they might do-and what they could not.
But the very measurelessness of the aspirations that increased because they did not face these obstacles made for
the assumption hardly anyone dared question in public,
that men had actually changed, rather than simply destroyed ages of inheritance.
In this unwillingness even to ask whether destruction
might not have made things worse, our time contrasts with
Rome in her civil wars. Open almost any page of Cicero, of
Sallust and even some of Caesar, and you will see there a
confidence we cannot conceive that their words will live
forever because they tell of men who had destroyed themselves and their freedom, and had little illusion that it
would not be forever, and that nothing would come of it,
except sorrow for the loss they could not help. And so it, in
fact, turned out, only much more slowly than now, because they recognized the loss-preferred sight to the exuberance of willing blindness, and did not deny the dullness
that had overcome them.
The readiness to justify events after their occurrence in
order to find a meaning for a war that nobody understood-except the totalitarians, who confused their confidence that destruction ignored had irremediable consequences with understanding-which showed itself in the
resort to aspirations for a new world in 1917, put free governments behind events. Between the wars, the complicity
that came of not grasping the significance of the collapses
of democracy in various countries increased their slowness
in grasping events and responding. It made them helpless
in the face of the continuation of the war until it was too
late. And in the Second World War, the depth of their unacknowledged sense of responsibility for the disaster made
them merciless in their self-justification, and incapable of
respecting their enemies, and blind to the consequences
of an alliance, born of necessity, with a totalitarian regime
worse than nazism and fascism, that had to some extent
inspired them. Towards the end, Hitler remarked that he
was the amateur, Stalin, the pro.
The situation of the free countries behind events has
persisted until the present-with the exception of the
127
�swift confidence of the beginning of the Korean War. But
even the Korean war ended not in a settlement, but in a
battle truce between commanders that reinstituted the division of the country that precipitated the war. The
United States remained in the situation of response-not
mastery.
To remain behind events weakens confidence in governments, for it shows them not enough on top of events
to understand them. And understanding, in our situation
of neither war nor peace, where many states are illegitimate and others lack the confidence of legitimacy, is crucial. In a normal situation of balance of power, such as prevailed in the nineteenth century or in the eighteenth, not
haunted by the fear of war, and where subversion is not
prevalent, response may be enough-not in ours.
The situation after the First World War allowed little
room for error. It called for more honesty, more straightforward practicality, for more courage than war itself. But
the war had consumed courage. Even the world that had
yielded so much death embarassed people. It was too serious to bear mention. The destruction of the First World
War meant human nature was on its own everywhere.
People felt the demands of truth, and knew they had to be
met, unflinchingly. All the art between the two wars tells
that, and shows that bravery-and, for the most part, it
moves as if there were no longer any history, or govern·
ments worthy of notice-as if the world lived only in private life and private sensation. But it was not easy to face
human nature. The whole period between the wars is
driven by the conflict between the necessity of facing human nature, and the unreadiness to face it. F1ight into aspiration relieved the conflict-but it did not restore confidence. It devoured it.
More than governments, people realized they were on
their own, in something like the state of nature, not of
choice as the excitation of aspiration pretended, but of necessity-of the necessity of past events, of destruction and
of the incapacity of settlement -a necessity that totalitarians called "the inevitibility of history," because they
counted on individuals' incapacity to cope with it.
The yearning for total freedom that took flight into aspiration, and that in the unrecognized desolation appeared
like necessity itself, did not amount to a capacity for it.
Precisely because the war had subordinated freedom to
politics-and made freedom the stuff of international relations-and in order to subordinate it to politics, dismembered it, politics tended to devour everything before it in
the search for a freedom greater than itself that would
show it its limits. These limits live in individuals' capacity
enough to distinguish between "yes" and "no."57 Hitler
came to office legally, and Mussolini also. The combination of a yearning, and incapacity, for measureless free~
dom that was taken to allow everything exposed men to
the most ruthless among them, to men like criminals, in
their incapacity to yield to natural law, to use Hobbes's
words that mean the words nature speaks to those who listen to it, in their thwarted genius. The incapacity to distinguish actual genius and nature from its distortions and parodies led to fascination and admiration for criminality-a
fascination that has again betrayed itself in the last twenty
years, and which paralyzes.
And the tragedy is that in its attack on nature, and its
attempt to destroy it, totalitarianism also uncovered nature, but only in war for it knows only war, which it cannot
distinguish from revenge or defense, and unmistakably reminded of its presence. In the midst of the "insane gran·
deur" of the Second World War, Milovan Djilas realized
that the fighting, after bringing his hardness out, also softened him, for a moment that disappeared until words recalled it to him a generation later:
Then, unobtrusively yet insistently, various thoughts came to
my mind concerning the Germans, the Partisans, and ideology. Why were doctors from Berlin and professors from Heidelberg killing off Balkan peasants and students in these ra-
vines? Hatred for Communism was not sufficient. Some
other terrible and implacable force was driving them to insane death and shame. And driving us, too, to resist them and
pay them back . ... This passion, this endurance which lost
sight of suffering and death, this struggle for one's manhood
and nationality in the face of one's own death ... this had
nothing to do with ideology or with Marx and Lenin. When
the sun rose, I suppressed these abysmal thoughts, for I
sensed how destructive they were for the ideas and organization to which I had given myself. But I never forgot those
thoughts ... 58
Nazism and fascism and communism were a vengeance,
and an exploitation, of 1914-1917, a vengeance and exploitation not only of the defeated upon themselves, but also a
vengeance and exploitation of the victors upon them·
selves-for why else did they tolerate the spread of these
destructive movements?-for principles they could not
live up to, that made them unrecognizable to themselves,
that made them feel like liars when they spoke and defenseless in the face of their enemies, now at home as well
as abroad, and more insidious than soldiers on a battlefield. For it turned out that they were not able to act in
accordance with what they had said in 1917, most obviously when Hitler seized the Rhineland in March, 1936:
to say uno," that is, in nature. And totalitarianism, in the
name of freeing this nature, attacked this capacity to say
"no" directly in each individual-with the argument that
it embodied the truth, and the truth could not be resisted.
It attacked nature itself, as if there had never been any
governments. And it discovered, to almost everybody's
amazement, that many individuals did not have resilience
128
-Maison aurait pu arreter Hitler sans risque de guerre quand il
a occupe la Rhenanie en 36?
-Sans aucun risque. On le sait. Aucun. Hitler avait donne
l'ordre a Ia Bundeswehr d'entrer en Rhenanie, avec une reserve imposee par le haut commandement. Si les troupes
franc;aises avanc;aient, les troupes allemandes se retiraient.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�On le sait aujourd'hui. On sait que, en mars 1936, on aurait
pu changer le cours de l'histoire. Cela fait partie de rna philosophie de l'histoire. C'est une date, une date fondamentale,
oil il suffisait de Iuddite et d'un peu de courage pour changer
le cours de l'histoire. Mais, malheureusement, Hitler avait raison. II n'y avait aucune chance de trouver en France un
gouvernement pour prendre cette decision. 59
Nazism and fascism reached deep yearnings, yearnings
for authority and its reassurance, not only in Italy and Germany but throughout the West-so that the world not unfortunate enough to continue them draws its breath interror at their memory, and shades its eyes from them even as
it feels driven to look, and is dull, with few important exceptions, to their continuation in the present, and the
widespread sympathy for them, in their denial in communism. Nazism and fascism arose in deeply traditional countries whose traditions war had partly destroyed and repudiated almost entirely-but which individuals could not
relinquish even if they would. (For politics is swifter than
character, and in the twentieth century risks uncontrollability because it does not acknowledge its conflicts with
character. No time's politics has denied obvious things
more, feelings, and common sense that comes of feeling.
For the political exploitation of aspiration is the greatest
underminer of feeling.) Nazism and fascism exploited the
yearning for the old values, destroyed in the First World
War, mercilessly: self-respect, duty, respect for accomplishment, the yearning for civil order, the compatibility of
freedom with obedience, the yearning for deserved deference, for meaningful life, for glory-and above all for courage. But they knew their murderousness, and did not hesitate to display it. Mussolini took responsibility for the
murder of a member of parliament, Matteotti, which had
aroused the greatest public outcry Italy had ever known, in
parliament in 1924. Communism, in contrast, with its
promise of a new world with new values without the harshness, cruelty of the old values denies its murderousness,
and, therefore, its hypocrisy is more seductive. For Djilas,
the murderousness of Communism is only a question:
"Killing is a function of war and revolution or could it be
the other way around?"
The blindness that came of the public exploitation of
aspiration to deny private experience tended to make the
world unrecognizable to those who lived in it. This blindness to world and self, this incapacity to see the world,
which led to the insistence on facts without understanding
or on understanding without facts-and, thereby, increased the susceptibility to propaganda-is the disturbance of perception that led after the Second World War
to actual political division of the West and the war that
progresses by dividing the rest of the world and individuals
against themselves.
The wars set what we would like to be against what we
actually were, in a way that made it difficult to experience
what we were, and to distinguish it from what we yearn to
be. Most simply, by setting liberty, the liberty of principle,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
against authority that springs from some contact with nature, the wars rendered difficult the growth of liberty and
authority in each other's presence. Without both liberty
and authority the experience of freedom in the actual living of individuals, from which the liberty in constitutions
springs, cannot live. Instead the separation of both liberty
and authority, and the setting of each against the other,
tends to provoke the distortion of their extremes, permissiveness, license, and weakness on one side, and cruel and
stifling authoritarianism on the other (whether from the
"left" or "right" matters little).
Liberty and authority are not the only qualities set
against each other in this conflict. The World War that has
not ceased deepens the division between form (principles)
and content, between will and desire. With the result that
these qualities are often experienced as antithetical, and
distorted in that experience. For instance, will into the
cruel rigidity of totalitarian dogma that cannot respond to
questioning, and desire into mere wish and arbitrary fancy
that cannot stand up to anything, and for instance, imagines it can get peace by demanding it, merely.
This division and polarization of qualities that can only
flourish in the give-and-take of each other's presence-a
give-and-take that is the ground in nature of the dialogue
between government and opposition in free democracies-hampers perception of political reality. After 1917,
and even more, after 1945 when the rigidity of the situation grew more obvious, and the force of that rigidity began to make itself felt throughout the world, this trouble in
perception has hampered fitting, effective negotiation and
action. Most simply, it attempts to undermine the capacity
of individuals (and also of governments) to distinguish between actual freedom and slavery that masks as greater
freedom. The struggle against totalitarianism goes on first
of all in the heart's mind. For without clarity of mind
among those for the moment spared violence, there can be
no resolute action against actual violence that takes place,
for the most part, not on battlefields, but at the will of often few well-trained and supplied men who strike at random, and who know that prolonged violence works to their
advantage both within the country they desire to seize,
and in the world elsewhere.
The inability to grasp what goes on before one's eyes, to
feel and to understand, instead of feeling in order not to
understand, or understanding in order not to feel, the incapacity to see, and to acknowledge that one does not see, is
the disturbance of perception that lies at the center of the
division of the West, and is increased by it. This dissociation is the driving force behind the division of the West. It
shows itself most dramatically in painting that like all art
often betrays the deepest capacities for living of an epoch.
129
�Perception
'
A little after 1945, first in America and then throughout
the Free World, painting that could see neither the world
nor man but that, until its collapse into emptiness in the
sixties, somehow expressed the anguish of the inability to
see, without acknowledging it, won public acceptance.
This painting shows perhaps more dramatically than anything else the incapacity to perceive and understand that
finds its general expression in the division of the West, and
in the drift and stagnation-and violence that involves
everybody-that has come of it after 1945. Significantly,
this painting also betrays the flattening and affectlessness
that comes of polarization: it has no depth, no world to see
and touch. For depth comes only within the give-and-take
of freedom and authority-and not when they are set
against each other and driven into the distortion of their
extremes. At most this painting betrays anxiety-the anxiety that comes of the inability to see, and increases it.
The process that culminated in painting that saw neither world nor man had started long before 1945, in fact
almost immediately after the impressionists, and well before the First World War brought the division that showed,
at the same time that it increased, the difficulties of perception and understanding, of apprehending world and
self that the West has struggled with since the destruction
of antiquity-and which have put the disappearance of antiquity at the center of its awareness and its language, and
its thought and art.
In the decades just before the First World War, a deepening division first appeared that grew into open opposition between form and content that distorts each and dims
the sight of the world and self. In Picasso's work a sharp
break occurs several years before the First World War between the paintings of the Blue and the Rose periods,
which still strive for feeling and vision-or, at least, openly
face the inability to feel in their risk of sentimentalityand the pre-cubist paintings like Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (1907) whose intellectual brilliance blinds one
momentarily to their deadness of feeling. In contrast in
the German-speaking area there occurs especially in the
work of Munch and Kokoschka an over-concentration of
feeling, at times frightening, because without the assurance of vision, without a sense that the picture actually
shows the living world-that there is a world to distinguish
from a rising dream.
To put it crudely, painters in the world that was to become the allied sphere tended to formalism without feeling and in the German-speaking sphere to feeling which
because unsure in form became difficult to distinguish
from nightmare, and, at its weakest, daydream. Much of
this work in either sphere does not reflect the world and
the experience of beauty but, with differences in intensity,
the inability to see it. It often leads one further from the
world-and into a self that recognizes itself in its isolation
130
from the world, a self that cannot get out of itself, and,
therefore, suffers the temptation to narcissism. In either
sphere, painters appear to struggle against something, a
transparent mirror that throws their self back at them,
against a transparent wall that impedes vision, even as it
allows them to catch sight of the world they strive to see
and touch, just beyond reach. Already also, depth begins
to fade into flatness.
This transparent wall that gets in the way of their eyes'
reaching and, therefore, turns the world into something
recognizable, but at the same time incomprehensible,
sometimes into the very opposite of what the mind and
common-sense know to be out there, is the source of the
division of the West that hardened, and, thereby, provoked the violence that could destroy it in 1917, to spread
it after 1945. The iron curtain, too, is a transparent mirror
that baffles the eyes with the image of the self it throws
back-and, thereby, makes narcissism and spurious intimacy meant to exorcise danger without acknowledging it,
and the sense of entrapment that comes of them, the way
to self-enslavement and destruction.
Since depth and a strong sense of the whole composition appeared in painting in Italy from 1200 to 1600 for the
first time since antiquity, this transparent wall made itself
felt despite, and because of, the lucidity of vision and
depth that came with it. In painting in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in Spain and the Low-lands, it almost disappeared entirely except for a certain stiffness, for
an incapacity to allow movement, for a tendency to freeze
movement like a snapshot. (This holding still distinguishes
painting since the Renaissance from the ancient art that
inspired it, for ancient art moved freely, especially obviously, in Greek vase painting and Etruscan frescoes.) Even
when it appears to disappear altogether, this stiffness, the
transparent wall, betrays itself in the awareness that the
painting is a painting, in the awareness of the eyes of the
painter, and of the hindrances that keep them from losing
themselves in their seeing.
This painting from 1200 to 1600 in Italy, and afterwards
throughout Europe, realized the reciprocal relation between sight and understanding, and, ultimately, between
seeing and rationality, but always at a certain distance
from nature, which lent it the stiffness I have described. It
depicted nature as well as men and history but it always
subordinated nature, even in the North in the seventeenth
century, to man and memory-to the recall of the past.
Some of the paintings of Durer and of Rembrandt are perhaps exceptions. In artists like Leonardo or Rembrandt
drawing was knowing. They could not see without understanding what actually lay before their eyes. In our words,
Leonardo and Machelangelo were researchers. With this
one overwhelming difference, they did not fear wholes,
that is, important conclusions. (Machiavelli, at the beginning of his Discourses, remarks that artists had been the
first to dare to learn from antiquity. And daring to look at
antiquity meant looking at your own world, without flinchWINTER/SPRING 1983
�ing, as Machiavelli's own work showed.) And everything
about this art bespeaks confidence, and awareness and
confidence in the face of tragedy. The whole sense of !tal·
ian painting in this time is of overwhelming lucidity, of a
world pressing in upon the eyes, of joy and fearlessness in
sight. They are wild in their beholding. The same seeing of
this many citied world-as many citied as Ancient
Greece-showed itself in the individuals who dared look
again openly at the sky-and to understand the great
works of antiquity, to look history in the face. After
Caravaggio, who reaches an unbelievable unity of depth,
shape, and movement, seeing and knowing again suffer
separation in Italy. In subsequent years there is much ges·
turing, there are dramatic, highly brainy compositionsbut there is little sight, sense of the whole, except as design, or depth. This gradual withering of contact becomes
apparent soon after the burning of Giordano Bruno in
1600. Such things are not done with impunity. But in the
North sight and understanding found a new softness in
their relation, and a lucidity more distinguishable from
clarity of mind than in Italian painting-and, therefore,
less easily capable of giving an account of itself in words,
but for all that not less explicit and meaningful.
The tradition of painting in the West since 1200 which
could see both men and events, could both remember and
know, at the expense, however, of a certain remoteness
from nature, found breathtaking renewal in the work of
Delacroix and Manet, just before the impressionists drew
upon it to abandon it, and to yield to nature directly.
In the half century or so before the Great War, Turner,
the impressionists and post-impressionists saw into the
quick of nature, and in that sight knew themselves a part
of it-without sentimentality or self-consciousness, and, in
contrast, for instance, to the woodenness of Claude Lor·
raine, with an easy sweetness still sets the world moving.
Even in Cezanne, whom we all too often see with Cubist
eyes, there is little separation between form and content,
between what is seen and how it is seen. Everywhere, perhaps most startlingly in Seurat and his associates, there is
an unassuming confidence that what is seen will gather
shape of its own. Many of these painters do not distinguish
shape from intensity (energy). They often do not sharply
define edges or outlines which arise, instead, of them·
selves, unexpectedly, in their work. For a whole world has
its parts. They distinguish but do not separate earth and
sky. Both throb with movement in their works, which har·
bour no empty spaces. They distinguish trees, plants, and
earth from the space and air around them. They do not
separate them from it. Their space is not empty, but vibrant and full and soft like the trees, plants, and flowers
reaching or showering or bursting into it. In Turner light
softly pulsates, in Vincent the sky glows and pulsates,
sometimes almost harshly:
The sacrifice of the sharp outline of objects shows that the
vision of the painter is focused not upon the objects but upon
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the space itself. ... Above all, in the use of the divided touch,
the painter conveys to the painting and through the painting
to the observer the vibrating, pulsating quality of the atmosphere ...
One of the results of this technique is to give to their paintings (the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Pisarro) a depth offield,
a sense of profoundness, a three-dimensional quality that
other paintings suggest but do not fully achieve. The impressionists accomplish this by making us aware of the space, not
simply as the coordinate of objects and events, but as an objective reality itself.60
In the brief moment of the impressionists the transpar·
ent wall, the stiffness, did in fact entirely disappear, and
movement reappeared unequivocally for the first time
since antiquity, but at the cost of seeing human beings:
men and women more or less disappeared from the can·
vas. To live on, the open embrace of nature of the impres·
sionists had somehow to come to see man, to remember
and to know, as well as to see nature as if there were no
man. Otherwise it would turn to mere evasion in the fa].
lowing generations:
Before the impressionist impulse disappeared in the morass
of twentieth century political thinking, it found expression in
the work of two men (Gauguin and Van Gogh) whose lives
dramatized the final struggle.6l
In the general streaming, sometimes harsh, especially of
Vincent's last pictures, only the men and women suffer an
emaciated, almost leaden holding-still, quiet and resigned,
but nevertheless forced enough to make you sense the
bound writhing in their bodies-the characteristic expres·
sian of Christian Europe. They bear the haggard and
pinned-down-in-the-chest look of helplessness, the cutting
and cynical knowing sensitivity that knows everything but
can do little, so full of pity and hate, yet also at the quick of
love, which, despite the blurring of postwar prosperity and
its convention of goodwill, still makes its presence felt.
Vincent wanted to discover the streaming outside man
within him also. He betrayed man's unwitting unwilling·
ness to yield to it:
Beyond the head ... I paint infinity. I make a simple background out of the richest, most intense blue I can contrive,
and by the simple conjunction the blonde head is lit up by the
rich blue background and acquires a mysterious effect like
that of a star on the deep azure.62
The tragedy Gauguin and Van Gogh lived came because they attempted to see nature in man as well outside
of him. For the seeing of the impressionists to live on they
knew they had somehow to transform and to renew the
tradition of Manet and Delacroix that the impressionists
had abandoned to yield to nature.
Renewing the tradition that had culminated in Manet
and Delacroix meant rediscovering the rational. It meant
experiencing the reciprocal relation between sight and un·
131
�derstanding, and finally between genitality and rationality.
It meant seeing man. Seeing man meant recognizing the
irrationality that separated nature outside of him from nature inside him, and kept him from both. It meant keeping
up the impressionists' contact with depth despite the superficial hardness of man, and the fragility that rendered
many men fearful of depth. It meant rediscovering the rational without abandoning nature, rediscovering it in nature. Otherwise renewal would be mere wooden repetition. In the failure of the successors of the impressionists
to see the world whole, the division of the West first
showed itself in acute form.
In this shorter perspective, the incapacity of painting to
see the world and human beings in this century, which led
it to turn the transparent wall itself into the subject of
painting, at the cost of the whole and depth, and finally, of
the obliteration of world and even self, simply represents a
breakdown in the capacity to maintain and expand the
contact with life of the impressionists, to deal with its contradictions, with the contrast between the impressionists
daring in touching nature and their corresponding incapacity to remember men and events, to experience both
the public world and the private, and their relation, to
combine seeing and knowing. The contact with nature
could not go on without resolving this contradiction, without undoing man's self-exile from nature.
Until the impressionists, painting coped with this transparent wall by actually seeing it, and, therefore, acknowledging it and keeping it distinct from the painting, at the
same time that it made you aware inescapably that the
painting was a painting. The impressionists dissolved the
transparent wall and its stiffness.
Unable to maintain the contact with nature of the Impressionists, and no longer able to work in the service of
religion, which in previous centuries, with its mediation
between the desire, and the incapacity, to experience nature, had kept art from yielding to despair, contemporary
art cannot but serve, often unawares, propagandistic purposes. It weakens those who attend to it. It steals courage
away from them. Instead of reflecting nature, it makes
mock theological, demagogic-and, therefore, unwittingly
political statements. It betrays a world grown flat and,
therefore, largely the creature of wish, of wish that takes
itself for desire, but dreads will.
The breakdown in seeing after the impressionists, and
the unacknowledged fixation in it that lends a frantic impatience to much art, in the midst of stagnation, closely
parallels the incapacity to grasp the meaning of events
and, thereby, to master them, in politics of this century.
Here, too, as in painting, man destroys world and self because he cannot maintain real contact with life in himself
and outside of himself, because he cannot stand living,
its rough disappointments, its joys, its depths and its
heights-and yearns for it more desperately, the more he
deprives himself of it, and, therefore, succumbs to increasing alternations of violence, in the name of discovering
132
and changing the nature of man, and negotiations to put
an end to that violence that turn out simply to tighten and
spread its hold on men.
Another example of the division and opposition between form and content that shows itself in painting in
this century appears in the contrast between the programmatic "internationalism" that blurs the distinction between peoples, and, thereby, puts the past beyond the
reach of memory, of the Allies and the frightening discoveries in the German-speaking countries, beginning at the
end of the nineteenth century, that man was often not capable of distinguishing between rationality and irrationality, that the rational in appearance often masked the irrational that in crucial moments betrayed itself in undoing
it, that freedom was more than many could stand. I mean
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis took seriously the truth
that individuals had to come apart, had to know their helplessness, before they could experience their strength, and
discover their wholeness, that "nothing can be sole or
whole that has not been rent". Not explicitly a response to
the war's destroying that would not cease, it knew how to
start at the beginning with individuals-with the existence
that yearned for life which had survived the destruction
that still threatened it. Like Socrates and his ignorance, it
nurtured the confidence that the rational, once freed of
the irrational that drained its energy, might spring up of its
own strength.
Psychoanalysis did not aim directly at the truth, but at
the distortions that obstructed the truth. But it made it
possible again to experience the unwitting presence of the
truth, for it uncovered the quick of life moving at its own
sweet will-and the fearfulness that kept individuals from
it, a fearfulness that individuals took for fear of destruction, but which numbed them to the rational fear of the
destruction that actually threatened them. Because of its
simplicity, stubborn enough always to threaten it with reductionisms, and because of its refusal to indulge in assurances-for it knew it could not know what would become
of it-it provoked much hatred and resentment. Hatred
and resentment that otherwise sought disguise in political
exhilaration that was nothing but forgetfulness.
But psychoanalysis had its limitations-above all in its
incapacity to know its limitations. Others might have
shown it its limitations, but unfortunately the strength of
its truth drove those that denied it, to deny it entirely, and
those that accepted it, to accept it entirely. With such
friends it hardly needed enemies. Both friends and enemies in unwitting cooperation perpetrated the divisions
psychoanalysis meant to overcome, especially a resignation to, and even an exultation, in the irrational psychoanalysis meant to expose in order to overcome. To some
extent the attempt to undo the irrational, in order to free
the rational, spread the irrational, and lent it something
approaching social acceptance. Social acceptance meant
taking the irrational for inevitable-instead of struggling
against it to undo it. It meant turning the popular misunWINI'ER/SPRING 1983
�derstanding of psychoanalysis against psychoanalysis in
the pretense of accepting it.
The weaknesses and limitations of psychoanalysis came
of its strengths. Superb in its grasp of'the present, it is
weak in its comprehension of the past and its life, except
as it continues like a foreign body unassimilated in the
present. It is weak, too, in conceiving of the future except
in the shape of the irrational distortions of the present.
Breathtaking in its comprehension of individuals, and in
its resilient affirmation of feeling and nature, psychoanalysis cannot conceive of society as more than a crowd of solitary individuals. It explains institutions too exclusively in
terms of the necessity of curbing irrational secondary
drives. It does not conceive of rational disagreement and
conflict. It cannot explain why people speak except to
lie-as Otto Rank put it. It takes the rational in history for
nothing more than a cover for the irrational. Despite its
destruction history knows creation also. Creation that
could not live without institutions and rulers and men, ca·
pable of some direct contact with rationality and, there·
fore, nature. For only direct contact with rationality can
withstand irrationality. Direct contact with rationality
means understanding that the irrational arises from a distortion of the rational, that the rational can be discovered
in the irrational. Psychoanalysis instead assumes that the
rational arises in history only in response to irrational
actions and desires which it secretly wishes, but does not
dare to imitate-and that therefore, because of this inverted agreement, almost always succumbs to them directly, or to a severity in repressing them that reaches the
corresponding extreme of irrationality, as if there were no
mean.
This pessimism that at its worst turns to resignation
comes of not recognizing the limitations of psychoanalysis. It can undo the irrational. But it leaves the affirmation
of the rational to itself. This readiness to leave the rational
on its own comes in part of the rational realization that
rationality, unlike irrationality, is unpredictable, that ra·
tionality cannot be foreseen until it arises of itself, that the
truths of one generation are the lies of the next. But it also
arises from an irrational antagonism to philosophy that it
takes not for the thought that comes after the dissolution
of the irrational, but for mere rationalization of the irratio·
nal. Because it does not acknowledge it has no use for
thought, it is unwittingly materialistic, even though it has
made possible the rediscovery of the soul-a grotesque
phrase that tells something of our plight. Because psycho·
analysis does not acknowledge it cannot take responsibility
for its discoveries, it tends to forget that the world is bigger
and older than its discoveries.
This contrast between the desire to apprehend a reality
beyond politics and the sensitivity to nature and feeling in
the defeated German-speaking empires and the principled
world of the Allies with its chiliastic declarations and its
yearning for the observance of treaties and covenants it
did not have strength of heart to enforce is another exam1HE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
pie-similar to the division in painting-of the distinction
between form and content turned under the stress of unlimited war into opposition in which each distorts the
other, so that content and feeling turn to phantasy and
dream, form to propaganda. Ultimately this opposition
leads to a world in which the democracies insist on limits
without conviction, and the totalitarian regimes pretend
to conviction without limits, a world in which individuals
and nations say one thing, do another, and neither know
what they do, nor believe what they say, and will not distinguish between words and actions. In the twenties and
thirties the democracies trusted the honeyed words of tyrants rather than their own eyes witnessing outrage because they could not draw this distinction between words
and actions. In the same years Wilhelm Reich discovered
that the actions of patients, the way they held their hands
and heads, how they sat and so on told more than, and
sometimes the opposite, of the words they spoke6l
This reluctance in distinguishing between words and
actions shows itself now in the unwillingness to declare Poland and other countries in eastern Europe in default on
their debts even after their refusal to pay interest on them.
This reluctance threatens the international western monetary system, and to some extent domestic currencies, for it
shows that in the name of avoiding a debt crisis actually
already upon them-and us-Western bankers and their
governments will not insist on obligations that make for
the trust that gives money much of its value. This tendency to take words for action shows itself even more in
the codification of traditional practices of international
law (ius gentium) in international treaties that imply an unwillingness to defend these practices except with words.
For these treaties wish away the distinction between the
enforcement oflaws within nations and the state of nature
between them, where only the threat of war guarantees
traditional practice. Would the Soviet Union use gas so
blatantly in Afghanistan and Laos had it not signed international treaties that assured it that nations with a voice
would disapprove but not act to stop them?
The struggle of painting with reality, and its awareness
of its incapacity to yield to sight, until its collapse into
something of blindness in this century, has a close parallel
to philosophy's struggle to understand man's relation to
the outer world since at least the seventeenth century.
The impressions of Hume, and the difficulty of their relation to world, and the appearances of Kant that are entirely within the individual, and yet have some exteriority,
for the space, without which their appearance would be
impossible, is both within the mind and in some sense outside it, are both attempts to cope with the transparent mirror of the painters. In its sense of the presence of this barrier, and of its incapacity entirely to cope with it, to rid
itself of it or to live within it, philosophy since the seventeenth century like painting since the thirteenth distinguishes itself from philosophy in antiquity, which encompassed both nature and man, and nature in man, because
133
�it was ready to suffer tragedy rather than submit to it, unawares. For the ancients the barriers that kept man from
nature in himself and outside of him, that changed emotions like love into lust, anger into hatred, courage into ar·
rogance, rationality into ideology, aspiration into self destruction, energy into frenzy, and so on, were within man,
a stiffness he himself maintained, and, therefore, could
dissolve into softness, rather than between man and the
world. They appeared like barriers between man and the
world only because man did not realize they were within
him. Because ancient thinkers realized that the barriers
were within man, and not outside of him, they pursued
the dissolution of distortions that showed themselves in
thinking, rather than accommodating themselves to them.
These distortions that keep man from world and self are
also always distortions in seeing.
The discovery of rationality in antiquity amounted to a
rediscovery of nature. The discovery of rationality in nature made it self-evident that evil destroyed life within
man as well as outside of him, and that politics, unless it
distinguished rational from irrational, would degenerate
into the destructiveness of irrationality in the name of the
rational, that politics betrayed the self that was really no
self at all, but mere distortion, of men who did not dare
know themselves, and, therefore, hated nature and themselves. In contrast, much of philosophy since the seventeenth century attempted to accommodate to these distortions, to live within them, and, therefore, has been more or
less unable, with the exception of Hobbes with Thucydides as his teacher, to comprehend violence from without
that attempts to destroy the barriers that occasion these
distortions, but actually only increases them. The uneasiness of this accommodation to distortion shows itself in
the extraordinary effort of many of these philosophers
who begin with the doubt of world and self to complement
their thinking about knowing with political philosophy
that, however, begins with the assumption that men cannot perceive the world directly, or know themselves. In
some sense they sensed that politics might attempt to
undo their accommodation to distortion, which was to
lead to an unprecedented mastery of nature but which,
however, at the same time that it demanded an experience
of nature made it all the more difficult. This effort to find a
way for men to rule themselves without knowing themselves, for unlike antiquity that only yielded to the nature
it understood, modern thought had mastered some nature
before understanding it, has worked to an extraordinary
extent, but it is aiso extraordinarily weak in the face of
men who think they know no doubt, because they cannot
distinguish dogma from truth. The attempt to apply the
doubt that in its accommodation to distortion had yielded
the assurance to master nature-without understanding it
entirely-to politics led inadvertently to a situation that
demanded the rediscovery of the doubt of Socrates,
which, in contrast to the doubt of philosophy since the
seventeenth century, had led to the experience of nature,
134
to the quick of life and, thereby, of rationality, but not to
the mastery of nature. I say, inadvertently, because these
philosophers had tried to fashion systems in politics that
with their emphasis on written and designed constitutions, on what people did rather than what they thought,
on procedure rather than content, in some sense asserted
there were no answers, and, thereby only questions without answers. The doubt of Socrates, in contrast, suggested
that you had to get along without the answers, not that
there were none, but that the answers would come of
themselves with the dissolution of distortion, that the answers were living itself.
This thinking could deal even brilliantly with public domestic life. For in domestic life it was possible to live as if
there were no public answers. But international affairs
were another matter. For constitutions did not regulate international affairs. In some sense the wisdom of the new
philosophers discovered its limitations, and its greatest
challenge, at the frontiers. For beyond the frontiers, in the
life between nations, you had to get along without the answers in order to discover the truths specific occasions de-
manded. In the life among nations you could not live as if
there were no answers. Yau had to live without the answers. The struggle that culminated with the impressionists, and collapsed after them, was an attempt to turn the
doubt of the new philosophers, which resigned itself to a
certain isolation from the world and self in order to master
them, into the doubt of Socrates that allowed the world
and self to live, and, thereby, to resolve the contradictions
and separation, but not the distinction, between domestic
public life and life between the nations. For art has no
country except in the eyes of the beholder. International
affairs demanded more than the assurance that comes of
recognizing distortion without dissolving it. There could
be no science of international affairs, only the truth discovered in specific circumstances. Only the readiness to live
without the answers could lead to the discovery of those
truths which did not yield to science.
Conclusion
I have written of difficulties in perception, and in thinking that distinct from perception cannot, however, win re-
silience and lucidity without lucidity in perception which
is the perception of life and of life perceiving itself. For
there cannot be thought, distinct from brooding and ideology, without perception, without apprehending the world
and events upon their occurrence, without the experience
of beauty without which confidence in the truth cannot
live. For truth is the perception of nature, of beauty moving in individuals at its own sweet will. It is nature perceiving itself, and, therefore, naming itself. But that the lucidity of thought follows upon the lucidity of perception does
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�not mean it is the same thing as perception. Quite the contrary. The lucidity of perception makes it possible to distinguish thought from perception, to know thought's independence from perception, to know th~t man is a bit of
nature, but a bit of nature that names himself and the
world. For it is man that thinks, not nature. But man can
think only when the nature within him moves freely
enough to perceive nature outside him, for the thoughts
he thinks are nature's.
This disturbance in perception precedes and underlies
the political crisis. At the same time the political crisis increases and deepens it. The incapacity to turn victory into
peace, into coherent peace, that marks almost all the wars
of this century, which is really an incapacity to foresee the
consequences of victory, to master events, indicates that
there is something in events that men cannot grasp and,
therefore, prevent.
Since the events of 1914, governments have been forever behind events. They have not overtaken events;
events have overtaken them. Understanding comes after,
not. during or before events. With the result that the understanding that comes after events seeks almost always to
make up for past defeats and disasters. In its anxiety to
make up for the past it often misreads the present, and, is
thereby, drawn into repeating the past, just because of the
urgency of its wish to avoid its errors. Events fool this
belated understanding. The very attempt to anticipate
events because of past slowness impedes the perception of
events unfolding in the present, which in turn further saps
the confidence anticipation meant to restore. The war in
Indochina did not so much undo the lessons of Munich as
show that they had not been profoundly enough learnt to
rediscover them in a war of disguised aggression.
The attempt to justify present judgment solely on precedent serves to obscure ambivalence, the ambivalence
that impedes the straightforward-and fearful-assessment of present events. This ambivalence showed itself
during the war for Indochina in the collapse of much of
the establishment in agreement with the protesters without even, for the most part, defending its policies. The protesters were not mistaken in their perception of hollowness in the establishment. In some sense each generation
has to rediscover the truths of the past generations on its
own. The recall of the past is indispensable just because it
teaches that it cannot substitute for present judgment.
But too ready recourse to the past for justification rather
than instruction betrays evasiveness in the present. The
gift that comes of recalling the past is the realization that
you are on your own in the present.
In the two World Wars, whose destructiveness showed
itself in the incapacity to turn victory into peace and,
therefore, in simplifications that told themselves they
came to terms with fundamentals-as if the uncontrollability of destructiveness showed men their true face, and
not the face they drew up against the truth, to deny the
truth-something essential was destroyed. I mean the
THE ST. JOHNS REVlEW
readiness to experience reality, the consequences of action, character, the courage of sight and pleasure except as
a matter of principle or propaganda, the plain light of the
day that fills up the day and which had moved the brushes
of the impressionists. I mean finally the capacity to distinguish one thing and another, and especially rational from
irrational. Men would believe anything and nothing. And
it did not seem to make much difference, whether they
believed something or nothing.
In either instance the force of aspiration impeded the
experience of actual strength. This incapacity to distinguish the irrational from the rational shows itself in disturbances in sight, in the incapacity to see wholes. Because of
this disturbance in perception little is self-evident, for the
self-evidence is in some sense a whole. And this in countries whose constitutions depend upon self-evidence, and
the experience of good will that comes of it. Amidst the
simplifications, the simple became embarassing like blushing,-and complexity became the refuge of bafflement
that would not experience itself. The irrationality in the
simplifications shows itself in its unwillingness to stand
questioning and outright opposition-and in the attempt
to suppress it outright, and in the willingness to foster, and
often to finance, all sorts of spurious opposition, which is
in more or less inverted agreement with what it ostensibly
opposes. This fostering of spurious opposition, besides
clouding obvious facts-for obvious facts are also
wholes-in doubt, fosters a bizarre combination of recklessness of speech-obvious but unnoticed in the "op-ed"
pages of newspapers with large circulation-and flattery.
Few societies in the past have betrayed such a hunger in
their fear of straightforwardness and goodwill for both servility and the intimidation of insult, for the qualities they
claim most to despise. The fear of straightforwardness
shows itself in the involuntary and overwhelming condescension that meets the words of those like Solzehnitsyn
who do speak their minds unflinchingly, a condescension
that imbues the truth with the stink of its own rot.
Like sight, and because of the difficulties of sight, of recognizing the obvious, feeling too is more difficult-seems
about to disappear entirely into emptiness. In this confusion of rational and irrational, artificially provoked by tales
of atrocity and the like, and in the consequent attempt to
suppress them indiscriminately, which leads to a despairing emptiness, Baudelaire's ennui, a person in genuine an~
ger or in love will feel outrageous-like what he imagines a
Nazi to have been. Feeling-and not pornography-feels
pornographic and often stirs in those who witness it, envy
and hatred. We barely recognize ourselves.
The present division of the West serves to blur the
memory of this destruction. No time has been so obsessed
with its unwilling destructiveness, so fearful of it as to be
unable to distinguish it from rational self-defense. But the
memory will not go away. It lives on in the suspicion of the
incapacity to distinguish irrational and rational that gnaws
at our confidence and makes us unceasingly uneasy. This
135
�lack of confidence shows itself in our readiness to ridicule
the past and its confidence, and to' exaggerate its failures.
There is much contactlessness in the West, and brutally
cruel, distorted contact in the East: where the flesh itself
turns wooden but where also life stirs in the destruction,
after the destruction, where almost the only unmistakable
voices we hear find words~ voices that arouse contempt
that is only a defense against fear, shame, and embarassment-the embarassment and fear of Adam and Eve after
eating the apple.
The ambivalence that shows itself in the fear of distinguishing rational and irrational induces paralysis. Paralysis
leads to drift. Drift in turn makes for the spread of the irrational-of subversion, sedition, terrorism, above all for the
spread of the ideological and propagandistic stereotyping
of events, and for the sense of helplessness that comes of
not perceiving the significance of events. All these hinder,
and prevent swift and effective-the two are almost synonymous-action.
The indecision that comes of this paralysis finds it most
openly cruel expression in the precarious balance the two
"superpowers" hold between life and death-a balance
that tests the love of life-and which at the same time that
it points to the difficulty of choice, insists on its necessity
in the starkest terms. Were people, and especially governments, capable of choice in the less overwhelming matters
of their lives, for instance, capable of outspoken support of
the Israeli measures to restore sovereignty, and to undo
the international terrorist bases in Lebanon, it would not
come to such a harrowing choice. But drift and its paralysis
often leads governments, and others whose work calls for a
rational response to irrational challenges, to connive with
this irrationality-because of a perverse unacknowledged
admiration for it. If the coming negotiations with the Soviet Union will bring no sensible advantage to the West
and no relief to the East European nations-as in view of
the current crackdown in Poland and within the Soviet
Union appears unlikely-they will turn into creatures of
this murderous fascination with the irrational.
Successful coherent peace-in contrast to the exploitation of the yearning for peace to undo the readiness of selfdefence-requires choosing freely to face harsh dangerous
realities in the absence of the overwhelming necessity of
battle. In some sense it requires more courage than battle.
It requires unevasive words. For evasive words can be
worse than bullets. " 'Bullets kill. Words prolong the death
by giving false hope. It is worse to prolong.' "64
At stake in unevasive words is the truth which alone can
give the political systems that seek to protect its stirring
the strength to act effectively to avoid the large scale wars
their dread of war may otherwise bring upon them. For
the truth alone is bigger than these constitutions which
cannot live, and, therefore, survive without it. It is the air
they breathe.
The truth means distinguishing between irrational and
rational, the only distinction that can bring the willing con-
136
sent without which freedom cannot live. Distinguishing
between rational and irrational means distinguishing between authority and authoritarianism, between genitality
and secondary desires which often seek refuge in either
totalitarian asceticism or license, between love and pornography, between self-defense and murder. It means taking risks-and distinguishing between passivity and apathy and safety. The incapacity to take these risks, and to
make these distinctions, shows itself in an indiscriminate
dread of all feeling-and in the resort to collective indignation and ideology to still the uneasiness of its absence-the
absence of life itself moving at its own sweet will. Without
the flow of feeling there can be no experience of rationality, no experience of affirmation and denial, without
which the distinctions between self-defense and killing,
love and pornography, genitality and secondary desires. In
each of these distinctions the difference the perception of
which makes the distinction possible is between actual
feeling moving of its own sweet will and the yearning for it
which makes people susceptible to ideology which often
brings the opposite of what it promises, death instead of
life. Only the flow of actual feeling-in distinction to the
yearning for it that shows itself in sentimentality and cruelty-can distinguish between strength and force, between consent and manipulation, between rational defiance and stubborness and spite, the defiance that
preserves rather than the revolt that destroys, and names it
freedom.
In some sense totalitarianism has done nothing but call
our bluff, our incapacity to live up to our ideals, to feel the
freedom that is actually ours, that is all about us but which
few experience in themselves, that is, the contrast between the knowledge that there is nothing outside stopping us and an inner sense of the constriction which keeps
us from moving. I mean the yearning for the simplicity of
nature, for its spontaneity, for its strength, for its openess-and also the dread of it and the disgust with it which
unlike the nineteenth century we cannot experience with
any forthrightness.
The nineteenth century could live somehow with the
sense that man was not entirely himself. It could perceive
still, somehow, its limitations at the same time that it knew
these limitations were somehow self-imposed and artificial. At the same time, however, it realized with clarity that
all that most inspired it wished those limitations away, and
might one day destroy them, although for the most part it
enjoyed still enough of the modesty of nature to understand that destroying these limitations would only spread
and intensify the paralysis they actually served to limit and
define.
Until the First World War destroyed the delicate balance between what it wanted and what it saw it was, the
nineteenth century was happy, because confident enough
to live within these contradictions. And this capacity to
live within them without denying them lent it the boldness of clarity so that its words sparkled and did not dread
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�warmth and courage in peacetime, and could tell outrage
without hesitation. And it could suffer, and, therefore,
events did not make it suffer. And it knew the meaning of
chance and that there was nothing inevitable in events,
that nothing that happened had to happen. It knew that
you could not explain what happened if you assumed it
had to happen. Because it knew that nothing was inevita·
ble, it knew responsibility, it knew it made events-it did
not entertain the conceit that events happened to it-that
is, it knew how to suffer, how to sorrow, how to feel com·
passion instead of murderous pity that betrays itself in a
swift look of the eyes that acknowledges everything to
deny it. It also knew how to tell outrage without hesitation,
that is, it could stand self.criticism and distinguish it from
self-hatred. Because it knew real indignation and, thereby,
real self-love and courage-and something of the taste of
life-it knew how to prevent the exploitation of its guilt
for the purposes of nourishing complicity with actual outrage, complicity that shows itself, gives itself away, by its
indulgence in worked-up indignation against largely imaginary outrages, for instance, the world~wide "uproar" about
American "atrocities" in Vietnam which were exceptions,
and of greater rarity than in most wars, and the eerie passivity that meets the murder in Afghanistan, in Cambodia:
it took the New York Times two years to pick up the story,
and then only after the New York Review of Books reviewed a French book about it. (People in the Soviet Union probably know more details about the murder in Cambodia than Americans.)
In some sense more ambitious for the truth than the
nineteenth century, that is, less capable of putting up with
even the mere appearance of hypocrisy, we end up more
oblique than the nineteenth century. Because we will not
know this hypocrisy, the plain straightforwardness of the
nineteenth century, and its readiness to acknowledge matters it could not cope with, embarrass us. We take our hypocrisy for the truth itself. And so things that were plain as
the day a generation ago, are now obscure; for instance,
that George Orwell wrote 1984 against Stalinism, not
against Hitler and nazism. And we barely notice lying in
politics, the lying that took George Orwell's breath away,
as Joseph Adelson remarked recently. For instance, the
major newspapers take Andropov's calling the President of
the United States a liar more or less for granted.
This greater obliquity, greater because unacknowledged, and, therefore, not experienced as obliquity, but as
a kind of disingenous straightforwardness or naivete,
comes from the inability either to stand the truth-or to
get along without it. With the result that we are uneasymore uneasy, the more we protest against uneasiness.
Much of what we take for boldness amounts merely to unacknowledged timorousness, for instance, the suspicious-
ness of all authority, especially government, of the media-which makes for the excitement of the denial of
common sense in the hope of, thereby, reaching depth, as
if the denial of the obvious amounted to getting at the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
heart of things, when in fact the simplicity of the obvious
overwhelms with its lucidity only with the perception of
depth. Otherwise the obvious appears fragile, brittle, ungiving, dead, dull, unpalatable, and boring.
Totalitarianism, unlike the despotism that existed before Napoleon, and which Montesquieu described, parodies our ideals and exploits our incapacity to live up to
them entirely-an incapacity which shows itself in our
readiness to take freedom for granted, and in our unwillingness to conceive that others envy it, and desire to undo
it.
The division of the West intensifies this division and
ambivalence within individuals, and to some extent
springs from it. A whole world means whole people, it
means people and societies capable of distinguishing between truth and lies, and knowing that the truth lives. It
means distinguishing between love oflife and resentment
and self.hatred, between freedom and license.
Like battle the balance of terror attempts to force this
wholeness on individuals at the same time that it threatens
to intensify the division that undoes this wholeness by inviting people and nations to yield to this terror instead of
facing up to it. Yielding to this terror will not bring peace
but only an intensification of war, and the further spread
of totalitarianism, which is a kind of continuous war of in-
dividuals against each other and against themselves, unceasing and apparently impossible to undo from the inside
without support from outside, support that must take
risks, including the risk of conflict, to be meaningful. And
not to resist means to yield. Even the leaders of many of
the peace movements will now upon questioning admit
that peace means yielding to totalitarian violence in the
name of undoing the much greater daily "violence" in life
under "capitalism".65 They are not after peace at all but
after intensification of violence which kills without knowing it, their kind of violence, which, like totalitarian violence, does not distinguish between peace and war. Totalitarianism dreads this wholeness more than anything, for
only this wholeness can see through it and dispel it. The
spread of totalitarianism roots in our own indecisiveness,
in our own paralysis, in our own incapacity to see what is
going on. And this procrastination prolongs and thereby
increases cruelty, and involves almost everybody in it. For
short wars are much more merciful than unending wars as
Lebanon should have showed Vietnam had taught usbut did not.
1. Cf. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Two French Revolutions, New York 1968.
2. Quoted in Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, New
York 1950: Man kann nur fuer eine Idee sterben die man nicht versteht.
3. Cf. Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build A Castle-My Life as a Dissenter,
New York 1979; Adam Michnik, L'eglise et la gauche, Paris 1979. For
China, the writing of Wei Jingsheng, introduced by Simon Ley, "La lutte
pour la liberte en Chine," Commentaire 7, Autumn 1979, 353-360. In his
most recent book, Cette lanc;inante douleur de la liberte (Paris l98l), Bu.
kovsky betrays startling silliness in making sense of his experience of life
in the West since he left Russia.
137
�4. Cf. Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival, London 1978; Leo Raditsa,
"The Present Danger," Midstream, February 1979, 59-70.
5. Foreign Relations of the United States (Conference Series), Washington, D.C. 1945, I 850-855 and elsewhere.
6. For the background of this propaganda, Bernard Lewis, "The AntiZionist Resolution," Foreign Affairs, October 1976, 54-64.
7. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy, New
York 1947. Lippmann's remarkable book shows deep mastery oflessons
G. Ferrero had drawn from the Congress of Vienna (G. Ferrero, TheReconstruction of Europe, New York 1941; cf. G. Ferrero, La fin des aventures, guerre et paix, Paris 1931).
8. Letter of James Forrestal to Chan Gurney, Chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, December 8, 1947. The Forrestal Diaries,
edited by Walter Millis, New York 1951,349-350.
9. George Ball, The Discipline of Power, Boston 1968, 151, cf. 149-168.
10. ForrestalDiaries, New York 1951,265-266.
11. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,296-297.
12. For Soviet thinking about nuclear war, see Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
and Amoretta Roeber, Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War, Stanford, Ca.
1979. For Soviet involvement in terrorism, Stefan T. Possony and L.
Francis Bouchey, International Terrorism-The Communist Connection,
Washington, D.C. 1978; Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, The Secret
War of International Terrorism, New York 1981. See also, Leo Raditsa,
"The Source of World Terrorism," Midstream, December 1981, 42-49.
13. The Wall Street Journal, December 7,1982.
14. For Soviet disinformation, see Soviet Active Measures, Hearings before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, July 13-14, 1982, Washington, D.C. 1982, especially the testimony of Stanislave Levchenko, 137-169. See also the testimony of
Ladislav Bittman in Soviet Covert Action (The Forgery Offensive), Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, Senate, February 19, 1980, Washington,
D.C. 1980. In 1968, the year of the beginning of detente in Europe, and
of increased Soviet involvement in terrorism, the head of the KGB's Disinformation Directorate, described the duplicity of disinformation (testimony of Arnaud de Borchgrave to the Senate Subcommittee on Security
and Terrorism, April24, 1981):
... our friends must always be encouraged to write or say precisely
the opposite of our real objectives. Conflict between East and West is
a permanent premise of Soviet thought-until the final demise of
capitalist power in the West. But this must be constantly dismissed
and ridiculed as rightist cold-war thinking.
Except for scope and boldness, disinformation has changed little since
the end of the war. Cf. the testimony of Bogdan Raditsa. May 11, 1949,
Communist Activities among Aliens and National Groups. Hearings before the Special Subcommittee to Investigate Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Senate, Washington, D.C.,
1949.
15. Letter to Palmer Hoyt, September 2, 1944. Forrestal Diaries, New
Ymk 1951, 14.
16. Letter to Stanton Griffis, United States Ambassador to Poland, October 31, 1947. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, 335.
17. Quoted by Caetano Mosca, Elementi di Scienza Politica 2, Turin
1923,450.
18. Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia, London
1925, 33.
19. Melgounov, Red Terror, London 1925, 41.
20. The words are Dr. Abdallah Osman's who was arrested toward the
end of 1978 for his western education. Quoted in the important article by
Michael Barry, "Afghanistan-Another Cambodia?," Commentary, August 1982, 29-37, 32. See also, Leo Raditsa, "Afghanistan Fights," St.
John's Review, Winter 1982, 90-98.
21. For one instance of the shooting of children, The Washington Post,
February 7, 1980.
22. For South Vietnam, Douglas Pike, Vietcong, The Organization and
Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, Cambddge, Mass. 1966, 249.
138
23. Michael Barry, "Afghanistan-Another Cambodia?," Commentary,
August 1982, 29-37.
24. This ignorance showed itself dramatically in the movie Reds that did
not even distinguish between the February revolution to establish democracy and the October seizure of power, and barely mentioned the
war. In this movie American mindlessness led to distortions that Soviet
schoolbooks, which mention that the Bolshevik minority destroyed all
democratic institutions, do not dream of. And except for an important
essay by Joel Carmichael ("Warren Beatty's Bolsheviks," Midstream,
March 1982, 43-48) and a letter of Lev Navrozov (Commentary, June
1982) nobody noticed. In fact one critic called the movie gently "condemnatory"-as if condemning was more important than telling what happened, and letting the condemnation take care of itself.
25. For this tendency, see the brilliant esSay by Jacques Barzun, Clio and
the Doctors: History, Psycho-History and Quanta-History, Chicago 1974.
26. Testimony of Stanislav Levchenko, July 14, 1982, in Soviet Active
Measures, Washington, D.C., 144, 145, 156.
27. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer
Maude, New York 1942, 10, 38.
28. Cf. G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe, New York 1941; also
The Gamble, Bonaparte in Iwly, 1796-1797, London 1939.
29. See the statement of Lieutenant General Marian Kukiel, Polish Minister of National Defense, in Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, The Rape of Poland,
New York 1948,29-30. The Soviet regime had about 14,500 Polish officers murdered near Smolensk and other places in Western Russia in
1940. In an article showing the Soviet and Polish regime's aggressive persistence in denying responsibility for the massacres, Nicholas Bethell
("Katyn and the Little Conifers, Encounter, May 1977, 86-90) quotes an
official diplomatic report of May 24, 1943, from the British Ambassador
to the Polish government-in-exile in London, that did not flinch in description of the, in its judgement, necessary evasiveness of Churchill's
government:
In handling the publicity side of the Katyn affair we have been constrained by the urgent need for cordial relations with the Soviet government to appear to appraise the evidence with more hesitation and
lenience than we should do in forming a common sense judgment on
events occurring in normal times or in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and
healthy operation of our intellectual and moral judgments; we have
been obliged to give undue prominence to the tactlessness or impulsiveness of Poles, to restrain the Poles from putting their case clearly
before the public, to discourage any attempt by the public and the
press to probe the ugly story to the bottom. In general we have been
obliged to deflect attention from possibilities which in the ordinary
affairs of life would cry to high heaven for elucidation, and to withhold the full measure of solicitude which, in other circumstances,
would be shown to acquaintances situated as a large number of Poles
now are. We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like
the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre.
30. Quoted in Michael Polanyi, "Beyond Nihilism" in Knowing and Being, London 1969, 20.
31. Michael Polanyi, "The Message of the Hungarian Revolution" in
Knowing and Being, London 1969, 28.
32. Leonid Vladimirov, The Russians, New York 1968, 101-102.
33. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, Autonomy in a Mass Age,
New York 1971,24.
34. S. P. Melgounov, The Red Terror, London 1925,97.
35. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, New York 1953,72.
36. Mikhail Agursky, "Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems and their
Future Prospects" in Alexander Solzhenitsyn ed., From Under the Rubble, New Ymk 1976,78,74-75.
37. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,482.
38. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,262-263.
39. Giuseppe Josca, Carriere della Sera, April27, 1973.
40. New York Times, May 9, 1975.
41. Joan Didion, "El Salvador, the Bad Dream," New York Review of
Books, December 2, 1982.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�42. Andrei Navrozov, "Letter to A. Bartlett Giamatti," The Yale Free
Press, October 14, 1982.
43. Cf. Vittoria Ronchey, Figlioli Miei, Marxisti IJtmaginari, Milan 1975.
44. Igor Shafarevich, "Socialism in Our Past and Future" in From Under
the Rubble, New York 1976, 58-59.
·
45. For a fine account of the first appearance of this propaganda in 1917,
especially in Italy but with general reference to the whole West, see Ro"
berto Vivarelli, 1l dopoguerra in Italia e l'avvento del fascismo (1918-1922),
Naples 1967, especially 1-114.
46. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Berlin 1922 (first
published 1918), 130.
47. Mann, Betrachtungen, Berlin 1922,47.
48. Thomas Mann, "Bruder Hitler," (1939), Gesammelte Schriften, Ham·
bmg 1960, 12, 852.
49. Gustav Janouch, "Conversations with Kafka," Encounter, August
1971, 15-27.
50. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York
1962, 32.
51. The" .. , and hold them (our British brethren) as we hold the rest of
mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends!" of the Declaration of Independence.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
52. Foreign Relations of the United States (Conference Series), Washington, D.C. 1945, I.
53. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, 80.
54. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford 1939,44-52 and 147167. Quotations from 48-49, 163-64, 167.
55. Quoted in George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, Princeton, N.J.
1956, 272-273.
56. Quoted in Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, Princeton, N.J. 1956, 511.
57. For a classic description and analysis, Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psy·
chology of Fascism, New York 1946 (first edition 1933).
58. Milovan Djilas, Wartime, New York 1977, 285.
59. Raymond Aron, Le spectateur engage, entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Walton, Paris 1981,62.
60. Alexander Lowen, "The Impressionists and Orgone Energy," Orgone Energy Bulletin, 1, 1944, 169-183, 173.
61. Lowen, "The Impressionists," OEB, l, 1944, 178.
62. Vincent Van Gogh in his description of his "Portrait of the Painter
Bosch". Quoted in Lowen, "The Impressionists," 181.
63. W. Reich, Character Analysis\ New York 1949.
64. James Webb, Fields of Fire, New York (Bantam edition) 1979, 182.
65. Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, "The Peacemaking Utopians" in
The Coercive Utopians, Chicago 1983, forthcoming.
139
�REvmw EssAY
On Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth*
GREGORY S. )ONES
The editor of The New Yorker magazine, William
Shawn, has described Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the
Earth as a work that "may someday be looked back upon as
a crucial event in the history of human thought." 1 This is
extremely unlikely. Schell's main conclusion, that calls for
radical changes in the world's political structure, is based
on a fallacious quasi-mathematical argument. Apart from
this argument, Schell's understanding amounts to a wish
for a world where people could live in peace. Schell does
not explain how we can construct a more peaceful world.
Schell's main argument hinges on the possibility that an
all-out nuclear war could lead to human extinction:
To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course,
be a misrepresentation-just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we
know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur,
the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use
all their weapons, the global effects, in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are not moderate
but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to
withstand them without breaking down catastrophically.
These are all substantial reasons for supposing that mankind
will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that
extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to calm
our fear and to reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same
time we are compelled to admit that there may be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the
global effects, including effects of which we are as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be extinguished. (Emphasis in original.)
Schell then puts argument in mathematical form:
To employ a mathematical analogy, we can say that although
the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly
speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In
Gregory S. Jones is a senior policy analyst at Pan Heuristics, a Los
Angeles research firm. With Albert Wohlstetter he wrote Swords from
Plowshares: The Military Potential of Civilian Nuclear Energy (University
of Chicago Press 1978).
140
other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the
game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever
get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere
possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the
certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no
choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though
we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our
species. (Emphasis in original.)
A small probability of an infinite harm (in this case, human extinction in large-scale nuclear war) has to be treated
the same as if the probability of this harm were a certainty.
To reduce the probability of nuclear war to zero, Schell
argues for complete nuclear and conventional disarmament worldwide. He also wants to change the world's political structure to "create a political means by which the
world can arrive at the decisions that sovereign states previously arrived at through war." In the near term he supports a nuclear freeze, talks between the nuclear powers to
reduce the probability of accidental nuclear war, and
George Kennan's proposal for halving the nuclear arsenals
of the superpowers.
Schell argues against unnamed (and, to me, unknown)
people who might think that the human extinction is not
all that bad. If only we would recognize the seriousness of
the situation, we would create this new world order.
The real problem, however, is Schell's argument that a
finite probability of an infinite harm can be treated as if
the harm were a certainty-and not that people do not
take human extinction seriously. This argument's total indifference to the actual probability of a catastrophic nuclear war is the trouble. For as long as there is a chance of a
catastrophic nuclear war, the argument does not change.
To halve the current probability of a catastrophic nuclear
war does no good; to double the current probability of catastrophic nuclear war does no harm. Any world with some
chance of catastrophic nuclear war is equivalent.
*Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1982.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The logic of this argument should lead Schell to reject
half-measures like a nuclear freeze, etc.,(even if a nuclear
freeze lessened the chance of nuclear war). For such measures will not eliminate catastrophic nu.clear war. A nuclear freeze will, in fact, increase the chance of nuclear war
since it will prevent improvements in the safety, security,
and survivability of our nuclear systems and impede the
development of precise forms of nonnuclear attack with
the potential to replace nuclear weapons for many missions. Even in a totally disarmed world with a new political
order, as Schell admits, the political order could break
down, a war could break out, and with nuclear weapons
reconstructed, a nuclear catastrophe could occur:
In a disarmed world, we would not have eliminated the peril
of human extinction from the human scene-it is not in our
power to do so-but we would at least have pitted our whole
strength against it. The inconsistency of threatening to perpetrate extinction in order to escape extinction would be removed. The nuclei of atoms would still contain vast energy,
and we would still know how to extinguish ourselves by releasing that energy in chain reactions, but we would not be
lifting a finger to do it. There would be no complicity in mass
murder, no billions of dollars spent on the machinery of annihilation, no preparations to snuff out the future generations,
no hair-raising lunges toward the abyss.
All this is very well. But the logic of the argument yields
no reason to prefer Schell's totally disarmed world to our
current one.
The probability of nuclear war is quite important and it
is vital that we keep this probability as low as we can. To
reduce the overall risk to ourselves and at the same time
improve the quality of our lives it is, however, important to
use our resources proportionately to our actual needs and
risks. For example, at any second (to use some of Schell's
frenzied prose) the earth could be struck by an asteroid
large enough to have catastrophic consequences to the
earth's biosphere leading to human extinction. There is
substantial evidence of such collisions in the past. (Some
hold such a collision led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.)
Telescopes to scan the skies for such asteroids and stocks
of large nuclear armed missiles (the size of our Saturn
moon rockets) ready to intercept and blow up these asteroids would reduce the risks of such collisions. We do not
man such telescopes and missiles because the risk (once
every hundred million years or so) does not warrant the
relatively modest expenditure.
The risk of nuclear war is greater than the risk of large
asteroid collisions. But the price of trying absolutely to
avoid nuclear war is also unacceptably high, because it
would cost us more than just money. Schell chides us for
continuing to cling to our current system of nation states
which we use to support what he calls "our transient aims
and fallible convictions." These include such trivialities as
liberty and justice.Z The logic of Schell's beliefs and of
much that is current in the antinuclear movement would
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
lead one to do almost anything to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
Surrender to the Soviets would be the easiest way, especially if one is willing to give up liberty and justice. How to
be neither red nor dead, however, is our real problem.
Schell's argument has so little content that it can be
used to support anything or nothing. Pierre Gallois and
Raymond Aron used the vacuous argument of a finite
chance of an infinite harm that Schell uses to argue for
world disarmament and a new world order, to advocate
spreading nuclear weapons to a very large number of
coun'tries.l They held such distribution would make for a
very peaceful earth because nuclear weapons would enable every country to deter an attack. This would be true
even for very small countries, since there would always be
a slight chance that their nuclear weapons would survive
an enemy surprise attack and do the enemy's cities enormous damage. Gallois and Aron argued that even a very
small possibility of this enormous harm would deter an
enemy.
Of the two notions that comprise his solution, total disarmament and a new world political order without war,
Schell correctly takes the new world order for the primary
requirement, for once achieved it would make disarmament easy. It is striking that Schell has no idea what this
new world political order would look like nor how to bring
it about. He leaves these tasks to his reader:
In this book, I have not sought to define a political solution to
the nuclear predicament-either to embark on the full-scale reexamination of the foundations of political thought which
must be undertaken if the world's political institutions are to be
made consonant with the global reality in which they operate
or to work out the practical steps by which mankind, acting for
the first time in history as a single entity, can reorganize its political life. I have left to others those awesome, urgent tasks,
which, imposed on us by history, constitute the political work
of our age.
There is nothing new or original in the thought that it
would be nice to have a world where people settle their
political differences peacefully. There are problems, however, not amenable to easy solution-questions like who
should rule the Falkland Islands, where should the Palestinians live, how to bring liberty and justice to people living in totalitarian countries as well as improving the quality of government in our own country. People have
worked and will continue to work hard to solve these and
the many other political problems in the world today.
They do not need Jonathan Schell to tell them how serious
and important this work is. But finding solutions has not
been and will not be easy and there's nothing in Schell's
frantic book that will make this task any easier.
1Quoted in Newsweek, March 14, 1983, 67.
Schell complains that the nuclear powers "put a higher value
on national sovereignty than they do on human survival."
3 Pierre Gallais, The Balance ofTerror(with Foreword by Raymond Aron),
Boston 1961, 129 ix. I am indebted to Albert Wohlstetter for pointing out
this connection.
2 Elsewhere
141
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